Archive for the ‘The Horrors’ Category

Dead Man’s Bones, Dead Man’s Bones

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

First, a confession – I don’t think I’ve been as actively geeked-out about a record as I am about this one for years. Thinking back, White Blood Cells and Moon and Antarctica probably provoked the same enthusiasm. Still, this record has hit me square between the eyes. I’m bonkers for it. I recognize that I have fallen for an inherently gimmicky thing here, an actor-led, vaguely-Halloween-themed phony indie musical sporting a kiddie choir. Nevertheless, I appreciate this record’s willingness to construct a very specific, obviously amateurish aesthetic out of odd bits of ‘50s rock and roll, pilfered Arcade Fire bombast, community theater musical numbers, and stray memories of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

It weirds me out a bit that Dead Man’s Bones has made a record that collects many of my longstanding preoccupations — Halloween, shambly indie rock, liminal states, ships, cemeteries, growing up, retro pop — into one album. I’m not complaining. Increasingly I’ve become bored by a lot of rock and pop (indie and otherwise) because it is so sensible, so normal. This record avoids the big bad boreds by creating a little world all its own. And it is a little world. I mean, how many people are going to get on board a leaky rat-abandoned little disc like this? It is, after all, a high-concept, precious nerd-hammerish novelty record.

I’m not entirely sure what has prompted has prompted me to retreat, listening-wise, to the little bedroom between my ears. I don’t really go to shows anymore. I rarely discuss the bands/songs I really like, relying instead on theoretical discussions about “name” acts ripe for sacred cow tipping. Maybe it’s because I — like most everyone these days — take most of my musical medicine through headphones. We no longer have to put up with everyone else’s tastes and sounds and whatnot. Maybe that kind of insularity allows niche records like Dead Man’s Bones to take hold. Maybe I’ve forgotten what a proper pop/rock song is supposed to sound like, instead taking up with spooky, clattery records made out of the rags and bones left behind by what used to be popular music.

Perhaps it’s fitting that I’ve gotten tangled up with a record about ghosts and graveyards. Sometimes I wonder if I keep listening to pop music as sort of self-haunting. Some “researchers” into ghostly phenomenon suggest that hauntings aren’t really the result of restless souls pestering the living. Instead, they claim that hauntings are the result of a location being charged with excess emotional energy during a traumatic event. Maybe pop music is haunting me because once upon a time it was exciting. Or maybe I’m haunting pop music because once I used to be exciting.

Still, I’m not sure if I’m the only creepy critter out there unable to let pop’s past go. As those Horrors and Pains of Being Pure at Heart records prove, backwards-glancing is popular. And one of my recent favorite tracks suggests, perhaps it’s not all that uncommon to find love in the graveyard of pop past.

MP3: Veronica Falls, “Found Love in a Graveyard”

And let’s not even get into the endless parade of reissues, fame hall inductions, dead icon vault looting, reunions, and whathaveyou that are the very blood and guts of the fast decaying music industry. Sometimes even kind of caring about the goings on w/r/t popular music feels like brushing the teeth of dead monsters. Not to knock paleontology, but often thinking about, making, and enjoying pop-like music feels like working hard to get something new out of something old — which, of course, is only a “problem” because pop music has for so long made such a stink about its own “newness.” Rock and roll will never die and all that. Plus that famous promise to die before getting old. Seems a recipe for undeath and pallor.

Anyway, Dead Man’s Bones is my very favorite record of 2009. The bats have left the belfry. Here’s to another decade of zombie rock.

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The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Friday, September 11th, 2009

The 09/09/09 Beatlemania thing has been a bit wearisome in terms of having to process all the “important” rock music that has been re-released. I didn’t run right out and buy both box sets or anything. I picked up the White Album because it’s an all time favorite. And I bought For Sale because it’s my current favorite Beatles sleeper record. It’s a slight record, a mixed record — about as “unimportant” a record as a band like the Beatles is allowed to have. I’ve also been dabbling with some home study versions of the mono mixes, sussing out the differences between the new “authentic” mono versions and the “sub-par” CD versions I know best.

Anyway, what impresses me about the Beatles pre-Rubber Soul (my mostly arbitrary point where the rock and roll Beatles stopped and the art Beatles began) is how slapdash and slight their records feel. Not that they aren’t well recorded or performed, but they’re recordings made for a disposable pop market. That something as fleeting as a disposable teen pop record could also be a little time capsule of real-seeming energy and enthusiasm is one of the great triumphs of mass-produced commercial pop culture. I can hem and haw about the “issues” I have with mass-market youth culture all day long, but listening to John Lennon and his band crank through Chuck Berry’s “Rock And Roll Music” is still a thrill.

The importance of the Beatles – especially the classic rock drug Beatles – sometimes obscures the fun to be found on Hard Day’s Night or Help. I’d wager that the “importance” of the social justice drug ’60s obscures the fact that the youth of that period remember it fondly because they were a catered-to market with enormous purchasing power and a whole world of new consumer goodies presented to them almost daily. I’ve often wondered how much of my own ideas of my youth (and the bits of my adolescence I paint with the summerglow brush of nostalgia) have been shaped by the ’60s ideas about and perfect teenhood nostalgia. The ’60s seem to have set the bar for all subsequent teenhoods. I mean, is the impulse to imagine the archetypal adolescent as suburban, white, sun-dappled, sensitive, and hungry for a wider world of authentic experience just a copy of a copy taken from all of the baby boomer understandings of what it meant to be a teenager during an untypical decade expanding consumer power and televised social change?

All of this brings us to the weird cult of imagined childhood, vicarious excitement, and re-created simplicity that is indie pop. I am, to an extent, a dabbler in and practitioner of this kind of twee fake simplicity and perma-adolescence myself, so I don’t mean this as an insult. Still, the world of insular jangle pop is built upon the foundations of other peoples’ (maybe not so real) childhoods. I’m not going to go into a complete history of twee/indie/jangle/whatever here. In fact, I’d mostly be cribbing from the very nice work that Pitchfork did on the subject a few years back (Pitchfork: Twee as Fuck – The Story of Indie Pop). Still, to connect the dots a bit, a lot of what the jangly nerd pop of the early indie/college scene was attempting was a recreation of that exuberant, joyous, innocent Beatle-esque pop rock.

As indie pop became an established form – and later a less-fashionable indie form – copies of copies or copies emerged. Bands rooted solely in indie sounds made records that didn’t so much aim for the Beatles or the Kinks but for the Field Mice and the Pastels. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is a band and a record that is lovingly built out of sounds and ideas that come directly from the C86 sampler and other such indie high-water marks. Much like that Horrors record, knowing how this particular sausage is made is not enough to put me off my feed. Sure, this is a slight, derivative record — but that shouldn’t be an impediment to you getting your kicks. It’s not like jangle pop is about meaning and substance. It’s about a mood, specifically nostalgia. Does it sound exactly like “Emma’s House?” No. It does sound like a brighter, clearer remembering of all that perfect pop stuff from the yesteryear of indie land. I suppose that’s an achievement of sorts for an album-length celebration of a genre that’s fundamentally about conjuring a bittersweet feeling about the sorta imaginary past.

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The Horrors, Primary Colours

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

This record could easily be written off as an It Came from the Valley of Derivative Hipster Rock thing. The Horrors hit the scene as one of the gimmickiest NME “it” bands – all mock-shock camp horror goth garage pose without the tunes or the sound to prop up the image. Think lots of “Ooh, vintage!” organ and shouting. They kind of stunk.

So when someone suggested that I check out Primary Colours, I scoffed. When I was informed that the band had shelved the garage stunts and was doing a My Bloody Valentine meets Joy Division sort of thing. “Oh, great. More of that.” Commence eye rolling. Stylish retro brooding from the UK – whodathunk it?

Well, jokes on me because this is a neat little album. It’s not great. I couldn’t tell you what this record is about. You can throw a rock at any given song and hit something obviously nicked from the Jesus and Mary Chain, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, and My Bloody Valentine. However, as tight little collection of tracks, it’s both familiar and refreshing. Tracks like “Who Can Say” and “Primary Colours” are hung on catchy, minimalist hooks and dressed in high-style mope rock frippery. You’re not going to chuck your copy of Loveless based on this album, but it is nice to hear some of those fussed-over Kevin-Shields-type noises being employed in a pop context. Sure, “Scarlet Fields” is total shoegaze lite fluff, but that doesn’t prevent it from sounding good.

Worth checking out in a “key cut” sort of capacity is the final track “Sea Within a Sea.” The lyrics are mush like a lot of atmospheric mope rock lyrics. The main attraction is the song’s rather sprawling-feeling length (in reality only about eight minutes) and the driving motorik beat – both of which provide space for some guitars v. keys wrangling. There’s a nifty synth arpeggio bit and some reverbed “surfy” guitar. There’s a spare part, some ugly twisty mangled sounds, and then a gorgeous throbbing outro that eventually drifts away in a wash of electronic sound.

In short, not a mind-blowing, “change your life” sort of album. A modest, moody wisp of all the right sounds arranged smartly. Still, it’s not unsatisfying. It’s a bit like a great chunk of mopey candy.

Posted in My Bloody Valentine, The Horrors | 1 Comment »