Fun Stuff > BAND
The M/F Thread 2009: The Quickening
pat101:
The Mystic World Of Augustus Pablo - The Rockers Story (2008, Shanachie)
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AMG
--- Quote ---Jamaica's Augustus Pablo took what was essentially a child's toy, the melodica, and turned it into something else again. The exotic, eerie, slightly Far Eastern and delicately mournful sound that Pablo coaxed from the instrument soon became a staple of Jamaican reggae and dub releases in the 1970s. Given his reticent nature, though, and his tendency to avoid the limelight, Pablo never achieved commercial stardom (if indeed that was ever even an aim of his) and while his influence on modern Jamaican music is immense, he actually only had one hit on the island, his 1971 single "Java," which single-handedly ushered in the so-called "rockers" style (the version collected here is a re-do from 1982). This five disc (four discs of music and a disc of videos) overview of Pablo's life and canon probably won't change that, but this kind of survey of his vital and unique achievements in the recording studio is exactly what his many admirers have been waiting for, and for the most part, it delivers the goods in fine style. Every aspect of Pablo's talent is touched on here, from his session work with seemingly every musician on the island, his innovative dub efforts, his fascinating solo projects, and his later work as a producer and nurturer of new talent. Among the key tracks included here are "East of the River Nile" (in its definitive 1977 version), "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown" (a restructuring of "Cassava Piece" and an acknowledged dub classic), and the intriguing "AP Special," which features Pablo playing the xylophone (Pablo could play countless instruments, including guitar, piano, and organ, as well as the melodica). Pablo was partial to minor key arrangements, and the so-called "Far East" sound that resulted from this fascination is as haunting as it was influential and pervasive, and aside from maybe Yabby You, few Jamaican musicians pursued the dark, lonely beauty of the minor keys with Pablo's focused devotion. This set shows the breadth and consistency of Pablo's musical vision, but it really isn't for the casual listener, since Pablo's sound can get a bit overwhelming and it really doesn't vary a whole lot, so a single disc selection like Original Rockers or East of the River Nile might make for a better starting point for those new to this utterly unique musician.
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Nodzz - Nodzz (2009, What's Your Rupture?)
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Coke Machine Glow
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Rating: 85%
Combined Rating: 80%
“But who knows if ‘eight days a week is not enough to show I love you’ is a good idea, or a bad idea, or any kind of idea at all? And who cares? The joy of pop music is that it can deliver you from such questions by its immediacy, and provoke them by its impact.” – Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Visions of America in Popular Music
“It’s all controlled karaoke / la la la la la / this song is phony.” – Nodzzz, “Controlled Karaoke”
There are a lot of hard lessons underneath the choruses of Nodzzz. That may be an odd thing to say for an album so brimful of juvenile enthusiasm; if songwriters are chefs, then Nodzzz are confectioners, their songs made entirely of sugar and syrup, shaped into something either airy or brittle. They seem liable to crumble under the slightest scrutiny; but there’s a real sense of disillusionment, slash cynicism, slash a hundred other things underneath a song as effortlessly brilliant as “In the City (Contact High),” the best Guided by Voices song Bob Pollard never got around to writing. “You got no money? / then beat it buddy / or stand there looking cool,” Anthony Atlas sings, letting out a sarcastic “cool!” over a drum fill. It’s easy to read this as a lazy indictment of The Scene, and perhaps it is, but the way the singer sings “You got no talent? Then beat it, buddy” suggests a direct quote, a remembered insult. Slagging the scene is a rite of passage for all of us, of course, as is the humiliation of walking into any situation without the right currency—money, knowledge of the bands on the Dangerhouse roster, being at a specific basement shows six months ago. So when he sings the song’s second title in the chorus, is it a dig at a poseur—someone not participating in the events of the room but being there anyway—or is it a lived-in sketch of the wallflower? Or is it a simple admonition: hey kid, fake it till you make it?
Or is it none of these things? It takes a writer a good half hour to think that all up and write it out; the song is over in 2:15, and the album itself is only seventeen minutes long. All of this I offer as evidence that the pop music found on Nodzzz is top shelf. Recorded on a four-track, physically only available as a 12” LP (a digital copy is available) and influenced by “British New Wave singles of the ’70s and ’80s” (so they say on their Myspace, but they never specify which ones, so you can only surmise they mean all of them, which seems about perfect), it’s the kind of album that gets passed around like a secret that everyone wants to share. Us writer types like it because it lets us play Connect the Influences: Alan tells me that it reminds him of “Dirt Dress, if Dirt Dress decided to be the Feelies and the Feelies decided to be Weezer circa Green.” That’s totally fine, but I prefer my own RIYL (“Jonathan Richman, Sebadoh, Vivian Girls/Jay Reatard/Brooklyn generally, ice cream, the ocean breeze, wet kisses, life itself”). Fans like it because it’s catchy, well performed, and funny. Sentimental types like it for songs like “Losing My Accent,” an impossibly left-handed and sly coming of age analogy about moving out and, possibly, down. “Think I traded it for rent,” the vocalist mutters of his titular childhood possession, and one has to whistle: yeah man, growing up sucks, and it only gets worse.
Those kind of songs in that kind of aesthetic make it hard to get an exact bead on the band. Atlas speaks, whines, and squeaks his way through the record, and in every song he hits at least one note that is just so wrong. Check the chorus of “Simple Song,” which is actually about outgrowing simple songs and ends on a catastrophe of a note (re: my notes; “this really puts the false in falsetto, n’yuk n’yuk”). But then he hits the same note again on the next chorus, and the brain demands to know if it’s being put on, whether its love of the goofy pop hook is luring it into deeper water or into sudden exposure, that a practical joke is around the corner as penance for your enthusiasm. I doubt it means any of that. Nodzzz is, finally, the ultimate fuck you to the aging process, a glorious embrace of sugar rushes and wide-eyed enthusiasm.
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Paavoharju - Laulu Laakson Kukista (2008, Fonal)
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From Coke Machine Glow
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Rating: 84%
Combined Rating: 82%
The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to instrumentation is typically associated with lo-fi aesthetics. Paavoharju are out to change that. Even more than the fantastic Yhä Hämärää (2005), Laulu Laakson Kukista translates the homespun psych-folk that distinguishes the Fonal label into near-epic, shockingly lush strokes of impressionist pop. Here also is everything that lies in between classical orchestration and musique concrete; the music of Paavoharju constantly expands and contracts in ways which are humble, majestic, and just out-and-out phenomenal. The fact that the band happens to be part of a mysterious Finnish commune of devout Christians is probably dwelt on too much in reviews, but it’s pertinent in at least one way: how else do you explain something so labored over and yet so earnest and void of pretension, except to say that the band’s channeling something greater than themselves? Suffice it to say speculation about what exactly makes this band so vivid and unlike anything else out there at the moment is bound to produce hypotheses of questionable substance and more than a little delirium, but bear with me—this music is more than worth it.
Comparisons to other music are as inevitable as they are insufficient; there’s any number of maverick acts out there that I could compare Paavoharju to. But that comparison would only work to describe a sense of shared ground with other bands that use any and all means to achieve a specific sound. Rather, I’d hazard to say that Paavoharju are one of the first bands to fully incorporate what found-sound masters like Philip Jeck have developed into a pop framework. Which is to say that Laulu Laakson Kukista sounds like fragments of a thousand pop records, but rather than assembling them into a drifting ambient landscape like Jeck the band build these fragments back into pop songs. Now, they don’t try and pass it off as straightforward pop; they allow all the static, disembodied voices and samples, and lost/undiscovered choral etudes to organically coalesce into silken, marmoreal slices of transcendence, and then they allow them to break apart again. For example, the fact that “Kevätrumpu” carries melodies that wouldn’t be out of place on an Annie or Róisín Murphy single is astounding in itself; the fact that the static and backwards AM radio samples are always poised around its Röyksopp-esque production in an almost subliminal way is something like a miracle. The modus operandi of this album, besides attempting to unite virtually every contemporary strain of Scandinavian music from Peter Bjorn & John to Kemialliset Ystävät, could be to show how much even the slickest pop will someday become an artifact.
Still, the fact that it’s not—that this is the premeditated, controlled work of a specific group of people (even if the details and credits are somewhat hazy)—is what casts this beast beyond the realm of accidental masterpieces. Leena Uotila’s voice is central, or at least as central as it’s possible to be in a sonic universe where everything is ephemeral, and she sings in crystal-clear soprano, offering up the strange persistence of clarity amidst the blooming chaos of nature. Some of the more pop-oriented tracks feel like lost torch songs, blasting through the fury of static and crumbling instruments as if they needed to announce themselves with unabashed grandeur before they drown in the noise. This quality is equally evident on the tracks where whoever handles the male vocals sings, especially “Uskallan”: opening and closing with the cut-up sound of a baby gasping for air, the track builds into a disco-rhythm with synths alternately smooth and static-drenched threatening to consume the vocals halfway through.
The melodies are astounding on their own—even if you don’t speak Finnish—but far more important is how the band refuses to take them for granted. Outside of the disco-pop of “Uskallan” and “Kevätrumpu,” melody is treated in a similar way to Alejandra & Aeron’s documentary/folk field recording Bousha Blue Blazes (2003): melodies are employed as a means of evoking another time and place, and considering how much of Laulu Laakson Kukista picks through Romantic and Baroque relics, it succeeds brilliantly. Of course, in the spirit of an album which constantly refuses to be pinned down, this is only half the story: sometimes the band breaks through with something so immediate and bracing it’s hard to believe it sits perfectly alongside the album’s restless experimentation. “Italialaisella Laivalla” is instructive in this regard: it starts as a simple folk song with gentle guitar-picking and vocals but then begins to introduce menacing electronics and bows scraping against strings erratically. But this dark shroud is only hinted at; the song breaks off into an outro of slow, carnivalesque French accordion. It sounds like something that should be too suffocating in its wealth of ideas to be evocative, but somehow in combination it creates something listless and urgent at the same time, like The Catcher in the Rye.
If there’s any relationship between Paavoharju and other contemporary Christian music, it lies in the fact that both tend to completely ignore all sense of “fashionable” melody in favour of something achingly naïve and immediate. There are also the traditional choral arrangements of piano/organ/vocals on tracks like “Sumuvirsi” and “Kirkonväki”; these melodies reflect Bach and a long tradition of church music moreso than anything current. The latter track also happens to feature some demented, horribly distorted and slowed-down voices, though oddly they only add to the reverence of the track as a whole.
Which brings me to my one point of contention, or at least confusion. The band makes a point of stating their Christian beliefs in what little publicity they offer and even state in their website’s 10-point primer that they’re “against the use of drugs.” Far be it from me to challenge the band’s beliefs, and I can even understand to a certain extent the latter point—when Agaetis Bryjun (1999) dropped Sigur Rós made a point of disavowing any relationship between their music and narcotics and perhaps Paavoharju have a similar agenda—but it seems that as a perceptual experience Laulu Laakson Kukista is too open to decry any method that one might use to approach it, drugs included. And while much of its strength lies in its sense of sober precision, it’s a long cry from asceticism. Maybe I need to understand the Finnish lyrics to comprehend the band’s spiritual convictions, and yet when I listen to them I can’t help but feel something that transcends any specific religion: something that involves purity and innocence, and darkness and light and struggle. Perhaps it’s proof that an artist’s statement always betrays the intentions of the artist, as all these emotional triggers will combine in different ways for every listener. Maybe that’s the real spiritual value of the album: rather than impress their personal convictions, the band acts as a conduit for all these forces to combine and radiate like a prism.
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ImRonBurgundy?:
--- Quote from: toxic shock on 17 Jan 2009, 18:10 ---progressionally not as good live and on record really really fuckin disappointing with the most recent one. who gives whether generations has no meaning? isn't it obvious from the lyrics. irrespective it's still a really good song.
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I respectfully disagree. Chemistry is a barnstormer of an album. Taken as a whole, it's probably the best thing they've ever done. Admittedly, I do like many of the individual songs on Hidden World a notch better, though.
michaelicious:
--- Quote from: pat101 on 18 Jan 2009, 22:56 ---The Mystic World Of Augustus Pablo - The Rockers Story (2008, Shanachie)
Pt.1
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Pt.2
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Pt.3
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Pt.4
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Fuck yessss.
GMM:
Huge thanks to Tyler for that massive Beck dump [IN A GOOD WAY] a few pages back and for the Jason Forrest. Also props to whoever put up the !!! and Justice (bleep bloop indeed, sir or madame). And based on the description I think I'll give that Post-Rock Defends the Nation thing a go.
Mediaf!re Thread, you are the best thing on the internet.
Jackie Blue:
ONEWHEELWIZARD,
Seriously mang that Rise of the Phoenix is so fucking dope I am going to go get high as fuck. You are my new favourite person in the world.
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