Music – Page 14 – Rock Salted

On Criticism (4)

Martin Mull is credited with the phrase, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” There are many variations on this theme around. The crux is that it is “impossible” or “pointless” (or some such thing) to write about music.

I once knew a guy who published his own independent film magazine, and he pontificated about how music writing seemed pointless to him because music needed to be experienced and there weren’t adequate ways to describe the content of music. I always found his views rather self-serving, as a way to justify his choice to write about film instead. And for that matter, musical notation provides extremely precise (if boring) ways to describe musical content.

When people talk about how futile it is to write about music, I wonder if they feel the same way about menus at restaurants. Can a menu ever really capture the “experience” of eating one of the dishes? Does it matter if it cannot?

More often than not, people who decry music writing are simply uninterested in the sorts of things that music writing can do, such as contextualize the social purpose as to why the music is being made (for live performance) or was made (for recordings and composition/songwriting). Moreover, the people who emphasize “experience” probably just psychologically favor feeling over thinking, which is a tad arbitrary, no?

CAN – Flowmotion

CAN – Flowmotion Harvest 1C 062-31 837 (1976)

Flowmotion is very nearly a great album. Bassist Holger Czukay described it as “innovative and eclectic” and “one of Can’s underrated albums.” He is right on both counts. Fans have been sleeping on this one.

The album has a strange reputation. The opening “I Want More” was a hit single in the UK, and one of the band’s biggest commercial successes of their entire career. Yet, at the same time, fans and critics have often expressed skepticism at that song and the album as a whole.

Undoubtedly, this album sounds markedly different from what the band had previously released. There were influences of reggae and disco. As one reviewer noted, the album has a “casual, Caribbean feel”, characterizing it as “a worthy and sincere engagement with then-current trends (which, come to think of it, is exactly what Can was doing in ’68. It’s just that ’76 was no ’68. Should Can be blamed for changing with the times, or is Western society itself the culprit?)”. The back of the album jacket featured two hexagrams from the I Ching: Hexagram 29, 坎 (kǎn), “gorge” or “the abyss” (in the oceanographic sense), which has inner and outer trigrams that both represent water; and Hexagram 59, 渙 (huàn), “dispersing” or “dissolution”, which has an inner trigram for water and an outer trigram for wind.

The ambivalence to this album — if not outright dislike of it — might be best understood in the context of general trends and the generalized backlash at disco at the time. As has been well-documented, the “disco sucks” movement was largely driven by homophobic and racist sentiments (even if the individualism it represented could be critiqued on rational grounds). Disco-bashing has also become a somewhat of a quasi-elitist stance — disco becoming associated with the working class and the less educated. For that matter, there were many albums going for a “tropical”/”Caribbean” feel around this time, and most were pretty bad. Flowmotion was probably just lumped in with other music that was chasing fads. That was probably the kiss of death for its critical reception, especially for a band characterized (sometimes unfairly) as being sui generis and as making music without precedent.

“I Want More” is a light funk-disco dance number, bizarre in having no lead vocalist, only background vocals. Mostly the singing is a kind of group chant, indistinct and diffuse. Against an infectious and repetitive guitar riff, there are single note keyboard interjections from Irmin Schmidt while drummer Jaki Liebezeit seems to (subtly) play two layers of rhythm at once, one slow and the other in double time.

“Cascade Waltz” is a whimsical number that crosses a reggae beat and slurred, tropical guitar lines with a formal European waltz (and foreshadows the band’s 1978 single “Can-Can”). Michael Karoli‘s deadpan vocals add yet another dimension to the song, one seemingly at odds with both the prim formalism and sunny playfulness floating around.

“Laugh Till You Cry, Live Till You Die (O.R.N.)” is kind of the heart of the album. Karoli is overdubbed on electric violin, guitar and bağlama (a kind of Turkish lute). This song comes the closest to straight-up reggae. The balance between genuine experimentation and accessible pop catchiness is spot on. Jazz records that do this are often described as being “inside” and “outside” at the same time. If Karoli is the star of that song, he powers the closing title as well — a more than ten-minute purely instrumental excursion with ambient washes of keyboard, menacing swells of bass, and swirling psychedelic guitar solos. “Flowmotion” is sort of the late-1970s counterpart to the band’s epic “Mother Sky” (from Soundtracks).

“Bablyonian Pearl” is kind of a goofy novelty song. It seems like a meeting of “Full Moon on the Highway” (from Landed) and “Come Sta, La Luna” (from Soon Over Balauma) over a loopy, slightly reggae-tinged beat. “…And More” was the hit single’s B-side. It is kind of a throwaway here, and is also the shortest song. It isn’t bad, though, and might work as incidental film music.

“Smoke (E.F.S. No. 59)” may have been the band “getting back into the sixties again“. But that sinister, gloomy track is totally at odds with the rest of the album. It represents a sequencing problem — kind of like the “We Will Fall” problem (in reference to the song from The Stooges‘ debut album). The song itself is perfectly fine, except that it totally disrupts the album and doesn’t belong alongside tunes that are within reach of Jimmy Buffett.

What does all this add up to? That is sort of the main question this album presents. There are great songs here. Yet the album as a whole struggles in places, due to sequencing more than anything else. Replacing “Smoke” with something more in line with the rest of the songs would have been an improvement — perhaps like “Sunshine Day and Night” from the generally tepid follow-up Saw Delight. There is also no denying that CAN was still genuinely experimenting, and those experiments pretty much all succeed. That they could experiment while also making overtures to accessible pop music is a real achievement. Usually such efforts have a high “degree of difficulty”. In hindsight, listeners who can get past biases against either pop music or experimental music (as the case may be) might find much to like here.

Madonna – Ray of Light

Madonna – Ray of Light Maverick/Warner Bros. 9 46847-2 (1998)

Madonna has had an interesting career. Her self-titled debut album is a classic of early 1980s dance floor electro-pop. After that, though, she focused on the sensational aspects of her public persona. This often meant a hyper-sexualized one. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, it often seemed to pander, or at least resort to pandering and filler at album length — she could still knock out great singles. But by the mid-1990s it seemed almost like she was stuck churning out slightly eroticized pop ballads, and she had taken that about as far as she could. So Ray of Light was a somewhat daring turn toward electronica, pairing her with producer William Orbit. The album draws a bit from the down-tempo trip hop scene, but retains a kind of mainstreamed rave dance floor appeal. This turns out to be one of her best album-length statements. Nearly twenty years after release, it still sounds good. Madonna comes to terms with middle age here, in a way. Maybe it avoids some of the exuberance and daring of her early hits, with more brooding and introspective qualities in their place. But to a certain degree Neil Hamburger had a point with his joke: “What do you call senior citizens who rub feces on their genitals? Madonna!” Countless musicians have tried to make a mid-career update, to seem more “with it” and adept with current fads. The thing is, Madonna pulls off that feat better than just about anybody here. Nothing about Ray of Light seems like faddish pandering. And she sings as good as ever here — her vocals are much stronger and extend to a much wider array of techniques than back on her debut. Too bad all pop albums aren’t this good!

Lana Del Rey – Ultraviolence

Lana Del Rey – Ultraviolence Interscope B0020950-02 (2014)

Del Rey’s second full-length album made strides over her debut Born to Die (and the Paradise EP) in terms of being a bit more consistent, especially from a production standpoint. This is more rock-oriented than her debut. However, the songwriting sometimes falters, or just comes up short, which still makes this seem like a good EP padded out to album length. The best songs are “West Coast” and “Brooklyn Baby.” Lou Reed was supposed to provide guest vocals on the latter, but he passed away before he could record them. A year earlier, she released the song “Young and Beautiful” on the soundtrack to The Great Gatsby, which is more in line with the style of most of her best songs.

Jim O’Rourke – Simple Songs

Jim O’Rourke – Simple Songs Drag City dc620cd (2015)

Jim O’Rourke has defied expectations his entire career. His pop albums (Eureka, Halfway to a Threeway, Insignificance, and The Visitor), efforts as a producer, and stint in Sonic Youth garnered him the most attention. But he stepped away from the limelight and moved to Japan — get the entire back story in the excellent article “Eureka” in Uncut (July 2015). Simple Songs is another pop album, steeped in 1970s prog rock but done up the O’Rourke way. The music is incredibly intricate. Hardly a second goes by without some sort of shift in meter, instrumentation, lyrical focus…something. Yet O’Rourke never makes the music self-consciously weird. He always keeps the music immediate and catchy. In a way, this album is a kind of tribute to the music of his formative years. Though rather than fawning reenactments, he treat the project with unwavering determination, as if he has to earn the right to indulge his favorite pop-rock idioms by putting extra effort into the production. Lyrically, he is back again with veiled and not-so-veiled misanthropic rants. But these are not really mean spirited so much as they are a device to draw in the audience and build a rapport. Much like trading insults to forge a friendship, O’Rourke alludes to the baseness of humanity, throwing himself in with that ignoble lot too. While I never formally met O’Rourke, many years ago I was at a concert festival where he played bass in a band and then he stood next to me during Borbetomagus‘ set. Unlike one of his band members, who played the role of arrogant star, O’Rourke seemed like a perfectly normal guy. That same normal but talented guy comes through on this record.

Maybe Simple Songs won’t be for everyone. It is pop/rock music, but of a kind of introverted kind. But chances are anyone inclined to like this at all will love it.

On Criticism (3)

There is an old saying the newspaper business. Although it has been formulated different ways through the years, the most concise may be, “News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising.”

When it comes to criticism, there is a real question as to whether it is mere advertising and boosterism, or something else. In that category of “something else” fall a few things. One is the insertion of the personality of the critic. In other words, the critic inserts or attaches himself or herself into the work. The critique becomes, in part, about the critic. Another aspect is the reproduction of social relations. This arises most often through editorial decisions, as published criticism is as much about what is excluded and included within the attentions (or “gaze”) of the critic. But it also arises through a frame of reference, enforcing certain points of view (or “habitus”).

Tuca – Drácula I Love You

Tuca – Drácula I Love You Som Livre 403.6046 (1974)

The Brazilian musician Tuca (born Valeniza Zagni da Silva) was an enigmatic figure, these days relatively unknown. If at all, she is recognized for her collaborative work writing songs for and playing guitar on Françoise Hardy‘s La question and playing guitar on Nara Leão‘s Dez anos depois (both from 1971). There is little biographical information about her readily available in English. However, Françoise Hardy’s memoir Le désespoir des singes et autres bagatelles recalls how Tuca lived in France in the early 1970s, then, after returning to Brazil, died at age 34 due to complications from an aggressive weight-loss program. Hardy also noted that Tuca (a lesbian) was infatuated with the Italian actress Lea Massari, who was heterosexual and not interested. Tuca also had some type of physical ailment that caused body odor (trimethylaminuria? fistula? diabetes? an overactive thyroid?), leading to self-consciousness. These currents of personal ambition, hope, self-doubt and disappointment contextualize what Tuca’s music was about on Drácula I Love You, her third and final full-length album.

The album was recorded outside Paris at the iconic Château d’Hérouville studio, where a host of well-known Western pop/rock artists made recordings in the early 1970s. The music is pop, in a way. Yet it does not fit neatly into any genre categories though. It draws from the mainstream to more skewed avante-garde rock, melding aspects of Brazilian music — Erasmo Carlos‘ Carlos, Erasmo… and Rita Lee‘s Build Up make somewhat decent reference points — to French chanson and prog rock. The album’s personnel included co-producer Mario de Castro, plus François Cahen (of Magma) on horn arrangements and Christian Chevallier on string arrangements. It oddly relies on a lot of acoustic guitar, with sequencing that shifts between spare acoustic passages and elaborately orchestrated ones. There are occasional electronic effects. Tuca’s vocals are very androgynous. She often sings in a lower register than most female singers.

The tone of the album is often despairing and melancholic — recalling La question and Dez anos depois. But, equally, this has glitzy horns like much Brazilian pop music of the the time. This is also weird personal stuff, the sort of thing found on lo-fi “bedroom” recordings. And there are some strange parallels to The Rocky Horror Show (which was on stage in London the prior year) too, especially the way the album cover shows Tuca in what one review described as “Hammer horror-movie glam[.]” Dracula was apparently “in” for 1974. Even Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr were exploring that theme in music and film that year too.

The strange, incongruous juxtapositions of elements and styles hint at what this album really captures so well — the struggle to balance the public and the private, the introverted and the extroverted. The album’s personality emerges in the way it can’t find any direct expression to capture what it wants to say. So, instead, there is an oscillation between coordinates that kind of surround its center, its core. Also, much like Jim O’Rourke‘s “pop” albums from decades later (Simple Songs, The Visitor, etc.), there is a kind of catharsis in the way the music comes together in spite of a conflicted, ambivalent attitude toward conventional commercial success. Tuca sings and plays guitar with a kind of punky edge, never completely at ease with the grand orchestrations that rise up again and again, persistently returning to raw, truncated guitar strumming and warbled, dispirited vocals. There are up-tempo songs with celebratory rhythms. Tuca seems unable to enjoy them. So she creates her own twisted, downer take on them. Not speaking Portuguese, the lyrics are a mystery, but the music alone conveys a lot.

A strange album that still sounds ahead of its time.

CAN – Landed

CAN – Landed Hörzu C 062-29600 (1975)

The first CAN album to be recorded with high-fidelity 16-track studio equipment, Landed is mostly a glossier take on the same basic format as its predecessor Soon Over Babaluma. There is a professional slickness in place of the usual relentless ingenuity. Not a bad record at all, but still a sign that the band’s best days were mostly behind them.

The Sonics – !!!Here Are The Sonics!!!

The Sonics – !!!Here Are The Sonics!!! Etiquette ET-LP-024 (1965)

!!!Here Are the Sonics!!! is the quintessential garage rock album. The Sonics’ songs touch on such divine subjects as fast cars, dance steps, and cruel women. The lyrics are wonderfully forgettable and !!!Here Are the Sonics!!! gets by through sheer force of will. It’s actually best that the songs just give way to the frenzied power of the band. Nuance wasn’t even remotely the point of The Sonics.

The band blasts you away with pure rock ‘n’ roll power. There are no slow ballads here! Their fuzzy-sounding guitars put a twist on that high energy Little Richard R&B, the big beat rock of Bo Diddley, and the noisy guitar distortion of Link Wray. “The Witch” was the hit single that initially catapulted The Sonics into garage rock lore. It has an eerie organ riff that bubbles under the the driving beat and raucous vocals. Raw energy and visceral drive are more important to this music than finesse. This became sort of a template for punk rock a decade later.

Gerry Roslie is a big part of what made The Sonics so special. He did pound out some nice keyboards, but those vocals were something else. The album took some time to record because Roslie could only do so many songs before his voice gave out from screaming. The results far surpassed his abilities on paper.

Though the group only wrote a few of the album’s songs, the covers are certainly not filler. “Do You Love Me” is one of the hardest rockers on the disc. “Have Love Will Travel” takes on hometown hero Richard Berry’s song with extreme passion. The thundering bass highlights the sound that became so important for bands referred to as “post-punk”. Rave-ups of tunes The Wailers’ “Dirty Robber” also help the album cook. Letting these hooligans into the studio to destroy these songs was part of some greater miracle.

This album is one of the most important releases in defining the rowdy Seattle rock sound. The Sonics made music that makes you want to turn the stereo to full power, not because you have to but because you crave more of that sound. Anyone afraid their ears may bleed need but step aside. The Sonics went against the grain and liked it; perhaps so will you.

Strand of Oaks – Hard Love

Strand of Oaks – Hard Love Dead Oceans DOC117 (2017)

Sounds like Ryan Adams joined Arcade Fire, and they listened to a lot of Spacemen 3 before heading to the recording studio. That is to say, this doesn’t exactly break any new ground. But it does manage some quite satisfactory songwriting and solidly delivers from beginning to end. Highlights: “Everything,” “Rest of It” (which channels Reigning Sound) and “Taking Acid and Talking to My Brother.”