Meursault - All Creatures Will Make Merry

It's hard to put an exact date on when genre stopped being a good way of organising a record collection and started being a confusing mess of labels but it has happened. Maybe it's a younger man's nostalgia for the years before his birth that makes the heyday of rock and roll seem like a time that could have been understood more easily than the fractured 'blogosphere' and world-spanning scenes that a serious music fan has to deal with today. Hopefully it'll all make a lot more sense twenty or thirty years from now.

In the meantime, we're left with a situation where accurate genre labels are likely to be a specific description of one or two bands. Meursault have referred to themselves in interviews as 'epic lo-fi', bringing to mind The Microphones and Mount Eerie, and as genre-labels go it's pretty much on the money.

The epic is immediately clear; Neil Pennycook's voice tears through pretty much anything you could put in front of it. It's a powerful instrument, loud and melancholic, almost Celtic-sounding, and more than anything else it defines the band's sound; a longing-filled, soft then raging folk. Simple drum machines and synths bolster the otherwise acoustic instrumentation, adding rigidity and fire to songs like Crank Resolutions, one of the album's immediate standouts,

The songs on All Creatures Will Make Merry have been in the band's live set for a while and the transfer to record is striking. Live Pennycook's voice rings clear over the sound of the band, on record everything is buried under layers of distortion and fuzz. This noise, more smothering than abrasive, leaves him sounding like a man howling on some far-away hilltop, screaming in the rain. It's a really remarkable piece of production and gives the album a distinctive quality, at once both earthy like it's folk origins and all-encompassing, huge-sounding like the peak of a ten-minute post-rock opus. 

Things that irritate me about the blogosphere - Part One

1. That I can't really keep up with all the news I want to and so perpetually feel like I'm behind the curve.

2. My laughable inability to find these buzz blogs that supposedly hype unknown bands. Where are they? I can't find them. What am I supposed to google? Can someone make me a list? (That's a serious request).

3. The word blogosphere. Neologisms in general make me uncomfortable, all feels a bit too much like fourteen year-olds making up words for stuff they like because they think it's cool. But that's just me being douchey (sic?).

4. (The actual point of this post). Reviews that talk about the buzz surrounding a record more than the record itself. Drowned in Sound's review of the Neon Indian album, I'm looking at you. A lot of folk must be like me, not really up with the buzz blogs but relatively interested in new music. Most people reading a debut album review aren't going to know much about the act, if they've even heard about them at all, so not bothering to actually describe what a record sounds like in anything other than the broadest strokes before diving into five or six paragraphs of reacting to the reaction isn't a review, it's an editorial. And not a particularly interesting one at that. I want to know whether the record is good. That's why I'm reading your review. If I wanted to read a low-key flame-war-by-proxy then I'd stick to political blogs.

5. The belief that anything that re-appropriates sounds from the eighties is only of interest to people who grew up in the eighties, which we should all be more than capable of recognising as absolute horseshit. I like Neon Indian and the eighties ended when I was two years old. If it's good music then it's good music. I don't care what NES game the samples sound like, I care if the song conveys a mood that I'm interested in (and a bunch of other factors, the possible subject of another post, I guess). The aforementioned Drowned in Sound review is rather chock-full of assholery, making snarky comments about how the guy behind the record must be a douche because he like eighties synths and samples. Then the reviewer gives the record 7/10. Spends the whole review bashing the record and it's creator with stupid ad hominem attacks then gives it 7/10. How wonderfully controversial of you. To paraphrase this approach to reviewing, which shows up all over the place, 'This record is good. But people have already said that so I'm going to call everybody names for a bit and then agree with them. Don't you love my overly-embellished prose stylings, you half-wit hipsters?'.

Coming up next time...

- Those old high-concept Pitchfork reviews that only talk about the record through a filter of snarky, meta artsiness (review as phone conversation transcript, review as letter from an ex-lover who is a stand in for the record itself, review of what the record would be if it was a sandwich bar)*. Which I have forgiven them for, what with how they seem to have stopped doing them.

* Not real examples. God, I hope they aren't, anyway.

Archive Trawl Recommendation #1

And you thought this was just a music blog.

Waiting for weekly updates isn't something that I find particularly up my street. I get obsessive and I like to go all out, read the whole archive in a few days if I can. This is fine with a two or three year-old blog, a bit more of a problem when the site is TV Tropes (two months and I still have ten+ tabs of the blasted site in both my home and uni browsers at any given time).

Some columns hold up to this better than others, reading about the life of a female adult-video-store clerk for three days was great, Charlie Brooker's Screenburn started out fascinating and rapidly degenerated into canned whinging around the time he started writing a lifestyle column (Charlie Brooker: Now in a low-fat, zero-interesting-content variety. All the puerile humour and fruitless rage, none of the pesky insightful commentary.)

So I'm going to occasionally post links to blogs I'm trawling and think might interest folk. Here we have Gaijin Smash; a black American teaching English in Japan. I'm liking the cultural insight, what actual Japanese kids are like as opposed to the anime/JRPG cliches, and that the guy is a little bit of a dick. Not an arsehole or anything, just a little snarkier than he has to be.

http://www.outpostnine.com/gaijin_smash/

Still not 'getting' Animal Collective

I've been listening to Merriweather Post Pavillion since it came out a year and a bit ago. I played some tracks from it on the radio show a couple of months after it came out (Brother Sport, Summertime Clothes), I've clocked up more than a hundred tracks worth of listens on LastFM, and a track from the follow-up Fall Be Kind E.P. made it onto a mix I made for my girlfriend. But, but, but, but, but.

I don't get it. There isn't a cohesive atmosphere from track to track that makes me want to spend time with the record,  a lot of the songs don't seem to go anywhere, the whole thing is a bit incomprehensible really. I like both of the singer's voices and a couple of tracks stand out as being catchy and fun to listen to, but the record just isn't especially interesting.

Which wouldn't normally bother me, I'd just drop the thing and move on. But when the consensus of the part of the internet I get my music suggestions from is that something is the 'Record of the Year' I want to make sure I'm not missing something; I mean there could be something awesome going on that I can't see yet. There's been plenty of records I've gone from hating to loving. The Streets, The Libertines, Every Hip-Hop track I wrote off before about a year and a half ago, Neutral Milk Hotel for crying out loud. Couldn't stand them before something clicked and I got what was going on. I keep thinking that's what's going on here.

Thing is, I don't hate MPP. It's just a bit boring. There are decent tracks (I really like Summertime Clothes). If there was something about it rubbing me up the wrong way I could see myself getting past it and enjoying the record as a whole but that isn't what's happening here. It's just not very interesting.

So I'll probably stop listening to it. Then come back to it in a month or two and try again. It's compulsive.

Fiery Furnaces' Matthew Friedberger Continues Radiohead Fight

Fiery Furnaces' Matthew Friedberger Continues Radiohead Fight

I'm thinking this guy is a bit of a tool. And not really very funny.

Meaningful title to follow

More listening based waffle :-

Nirvana - ‘In Utero’

Like everyone who passed through the age of fifteen in the last ten or fifteen years, I went through a Nirvana phase in my early to mid teens, so it’s kinda hard to separate the music from the teenage mindset it reminds me of. Though to be fair, at that age I wasn’t actually all that into the ‘noisy stuff’, much as I might have acted otherwise, tending to prefer the acoustic or more melodic end of the spectrum. Plus I only owned the Greatest Hits, a fairly pointless disc for a band that only recorded two great records and yet it still managed to throughly miss both a large number of great tracks and, more importantly, the point. Still, now that I do like the ‘noisy stuff’, well more than I did anyway, ‘In Utero’ stands out as astonishing approachable and tuneful for a record famed for it volume and abrasive tone. Cobain may not be a demi-god, or that much better than some of his contemporaries, but he was sure as hell onto some seriously impressive shit.

Sun Kil Moon - ‘April’

I got into Sun Kil Moon/Mark Kozelek/Red House Painters/Multiple Names for the same bloke with the same instrumentation through his album of Modest Mouse covers ‘Tiny Cities’, which was interesting and actually worth listening to as an album, unusually for a covers record. Anyway, seems he tends towards John Darnielle levels of prolificism, so finding a starting point is tough. Also, with both of his records I’ve tried so far, this one and ‘Ocean Beach’, I tend to get stuck on the first track and miss out on the rest of the album. Not because they’re bad, quite the opposite, they start with two of the most astonishingly beautiful pieces of music that I’ve ever heard, in the case of ‘April’ the nine minute plus ‘Lost Verses’ which could be the most comforting and touching song I’ve heard well.... ever, actually. Rest of the album isn’t too shabby either.

Gender neutral

Listened to in the past few hours :-

The Thermals - ‘Fuckin’ A’, most of ‘Now We Can See’ and a bit of ‘The Body, The Blood, The Machine’.

Usually saying that a band is remarkably similar from record to record would be a bad thing. When that band sound like this though, I really couldn’t be less bothered. Bracing is the best word I can think of though it doesn’t really do it justice.

Sleater-Kinney - ‘The Woods’

That is what guitars are supposed to sound like. Catchy, energetic and atmospheric. Bitchin’, basically.*

The Pixies - ‘Surfer Rosa’

It’s all been said before really, except that it’s taken me longer than I expected to get into this and it’s still the only one of their records I listen to often. Something about them confuses me, not too sure what it is.

Absolutely nothing by The Hold Steady. I should be ashamed.


I just finished reading QED, not the Feynman book but the Peter Parnell play about Feynman that originally starred Alan Alda. Not a huge amount of new info but structured very nicely, I’d have loved to have seen the original production. If you have no idea what the hell I’m on about, buy yourself a copy of ‘Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!’ by the titular Richard Feynman, well worth... well anything you’re likely to be charged for it anyway.

*Aren’t you proud of me, I managed to comment on Sleater-Kinney without mentioning they’re not actually guys, which everyone in rock music is apparently legally required to be. I will buy a sandwich for anyone who reviews their next album and at no point mentions their gender and doesn’t seem like they’re avoiding it to make a point.