Howlround - The Debatable Lands

Russell Cuzner over at The Quietus, a site that's always given me more than I expected and less than what I hoped for, has a writing style that could be best be described as "simultaneously pinched and diarrhetic." That is to say his style feels very precise, but also very random. To put it more bluntly, I have no idea what he's fucking talking about half the time.

Our collectively rested and newly revived listening powers were at their keenest as water coursed anew through dry plumbing while chattering servers booted and backed up rendering artful the accidental sounds of our surroundings.

The end of that sentence has prose so purple that even Prince would have been like, dude, that might be a little too much (because Prince likes Purple! Get it! He also liked making his wife pretend their baby hadn't just died so she wouldn't fuck up his interview with Oprah!). And a comma before rendering would have saved readers from having to double back and re-read the sentence to understand what he was saying. Here's another example.

While we were all prepared to value sounds that are found, we realised that the fervency with which we listened to the unsourced aura was greater due to its mystery - had we known it was the building our sensitivity would have been sapped. And so, listening with uncertainty is the mode we have adopted in selecting this month’s Rum highlights, letting ourselves be guided more by each sound’s narrative and less by its source.

Yeah man, like totally. Of course, he spends almost the entirety of the article telling us all about the sound's sources. So whatever. Cuzner writing reminds me of something a teacher used to yell at us. "Don't try to sound smart. Either be smart, or don't be smart. But don't try." Cuzner's writing resembles sitting through a toddler attempting to tell you a joke. It's not that their not capable of doing it well, but in their need to overreach, to do more than they're capable of, they just end up going on way too long and kind of failing in the process. In Cuzner's case, that means attempting to sound lyrical and profound, but instead ends up sounding vague and like he's not really sure how to use the language (that change in verb tense in the first sentence's introductory clause--that "are" should be "were," Russ).

But then maybe his prose is meant to be as abrasive and annoying as the music he tends to champion. And while I'm not a fan of annoying writing, I'm a big fan of annoying music. And holy fuck is Howlround annoying. I love it.

I'm going to spare you the backstory on this album. Backstories are, after all, one of the ways in which experimental music folks provide a context, that is to say a narrative, around music that doesn't have much of either on its own. I think music writers like to use music like this as a way to stretch out and indulge, to project their own poetic impulses onto the blank(er, compared to most music) canvas provide to them. (I know I always liked to, anyway.) But I'm not going to do any of that here (you're welcome). The Debatable Lands sounds like a silicon aneurysm (okay, maybe I'll do a little bit). It makes more-famous challenging things like Metal Machine Music sound like (insert example of innocuous new-age-y sounding thing here). It could clear a room in minutes, get you fired from your coffee shop if you played it over the speakers, and makes my ears feel the way strobe lights make my eyes feel. It would make a great soundtrack to a panic attack. If you played it while fucking, your children would be born with inexplicable tremors in all of their muscles. It is extreme to the point where beauty and banality intersect. And in an era where most people's motivation--socially, creatively, occupationally--is to try and be liked by as many people as possible, to the point of beige-ing out themselves into they are nearly indistinguishable from the chair they're sitting in, an album like this is a brave act of insurrection. Power to the Howlrounds.

The Number Fortys: Talk Talk - "It's My Life"

In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).

There's something almost unspeakably poignant about hearing this song in the wake of Mark Hollis' death last week. I mean, the chorus of this song ends with Hollis singing, It's my life, it never ends, and I just, it's hard listening.

For anyone living under a stone, or with ears of stone, or with a heart of stone, Hollis was the main guy in Talk Talk. I hadn't listened to this song since he died, immersing myself instead in his later more experimental, (even) more spiritual music.

The melody is so beautiful, with its unexpected pauses, its unexpected rises and falls, that it's easy to miss the lyrics, which Hollis, in love with this melody he's found, mumbles a little bit so as not to get in the way. The lyrics are open to interpretation, but in a way that's ambiguous instead of ambivalent. That is to say, there is room in the song for people to inhabit it as needed. It's a mystery that invites you in rather than keeps you out. It also has a bassline so catchy that if Hollis had never opened his mouth you'd still go around singing the bassline to yourself.

This was the only Talk Talk song to reach the US Top 40, peaking at #31. Remarkably, it only reached #46 in Talk Talk's UK home.

Score: A couple of weeks ago, I would have been vacillating between a 9 and a 10, but this week the decision is easy. A solid fucking 10.

Some 90s band did a cover of this song that is better known than the original. Because their singer sounds like a sick duck begging for money, and their band sounds like everything horrible I heard growing up in California, their version is a 2.

I think I just came up with a great system for evaluating cover versions: score the original, score the cover, and then subtract the original's score from the cover's. So in this case that band's cover gets a -8 (2 minus 10). That's pretty bad. For comparison's sake, The Eagles' Take It to the Limit gets a 5, but Sarah Dougher's cover of the song gets an 8. What's that? You've never heard of Sarah Dougher, or her version of Take It to the Limit? It's only a well-placed movie scene away from becoming a classic.

So you take Sarah's 8, subtract the Eagles' 5, and Sarah Dougher's cover is a 3. Feel free to play along.

THE NUMBER ONE



Oh look, it's Phil Collins. Phil did some cool shit in his career, songs that showed he was paying attention when he was playing on those Eno records. In fact, with their mutual baldingness, their embrace of new recording techniques, and merging of electronics and soul, who's to say that Brian Eno couldn't have also been a star in the 80s on the same level as his 70s peers Phil and Peter Garbriel?

This song doesn't do any of those things. It's just a really good ballad with a video featuring two actors, Jeff Bridges and James Woods, who would, respectively, go on to a much better and a much worse future, Bridges would, of course, become one of his generation's greatest, most iconic actors. Woods, after a string of great performances (what the fuck do you mean you've never see Salvador?), would eventually descend into a paranoiac cesspool of hateful ultra-right smugness.

The song itself is too blandly sentimental and vague to actually convey the heartbreak it's ostensibly about. Phil invests the song with every ounce of soul in his being, and were his soulfulness the equal of say, Aretha or Marvin, or Karen Carpenter, then this song might be more than what it ultimately is; a 6.

The Number Fortys: Madonna - "Borderline"

In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).

I interviewed our 4 1/2 year old, who adores the first two Madonna albums (we had them on cassette, and played them in the van until the tape player died).

What do you like about it?

I just like all the parts of the song.

Do the words mean anything to you?

I don't like the words.

Why not?

They're just a little bit too sad.

You don't like sad songs?

Uh-uh.

What's a happy song that you like?

Almost all the Beatle songs?

Are there any sad Beatle songs?

Nope.

Is this your favorite Madonna song?

Kinda.

Are there any you like better?

I just think this one.

Do you think it would be a fun song to dance to?

No.

Madonna, looks like your mom a little bit, huh?

Yeah.

Thank you for your help.

You're Welcome.


I don't have much to add, other than I agree with everything he said except for the Beatles not having any sad songs. But then, I don't think any of them are as sad as this. Most sad Beatles songs feel, to me anyway, more like a performance of a sad song than actual sadness (this is not true at all of John and Paul's solo albums btw, and testifies to the role their partners played in opening them up emotionally). Anyway, this song went to #10. It was Madonna's third single to hit the Top 20, and whether we see her at #40 or #1, we will be seeing a lot more of her as this column progresses.

True Madonna story: many years ago I embarked on a cross-country poetry tour to promote an anthology we (and others) had been published in. A friend of mine, she gave me a CD of The Immaculate Collection to listen to on tour. When I pulled it out of my bag a week or so into the tour, these smelly boys all got made I hadn't pulled it out sooner. Now two of these boys loved Pearl Jam way too much (I remember one guy telling me the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "I Could Have Lied" featured the greatest guitar solo ever played, and everything about that sentence made my body feel tangible pain), so I was surprised. But I shouldn't have been. Madonna's run of 80s singles is a virtually unhateable body of work, except for the True Blue, Who's That Girl, Causing a Commotion speed bump, but we can probably blame that on her piece of shit husband at the time, Sean Penn, because she started kicking ass again as soon as he left the picture.

Anyway, Borderline is a 9.


THE NUMBER ONE

I have nothing left to say about this hand-clapping turd of a song except this is the last time I'll have to copy & paste it into one of these article (unless it hits #40 on its way back down the chart, in which case may god have mercy on all of our souls).

Teen - Good Fruit

It is still a mystery to us why TEEN (I don't usually indulge artist's typographical affectations--I'm looking at you Tuneyards--but I will make an exception for TEEN, such is their music's affect on me) isn't one of the biggest bands in the world. Not only do they have a sound that would seamlessly on any Top 40 radio station, or any commercial alternative station, but their songs have melodic hooks and a lyrical depth that is rare in this day and age.

To put it bluntly, we find their music incredibly beautiful and moving. It fills us with a simultaneously shock of joy and sadness that is not unlike confronting the sublimity and power of being alive. Think standing on an ocean, contemplating the vastness of existence while looking down and pondering the Fibonacci embedded in the contours of a shell.

It's also fun. You can dance to it.2016's Love Yes has been played in our house since it came out (we found the vinyl in the clearance bin at our local record store half off for about $10).

This one might be even better. It's certainly sadder, more desperate, filled with a longing that we've all experienced at some time or another. I guess I'm trying to say that I feel a healing power in this music (I am trying harder, when I write about music, to not be afraid of being sentimental; I want to rely less on the pseudo-objective proof of quoting lyrics, of using analysis as a way of "making a case;" I am trying harder to share). Here's my favorite song so far. It embodies the humor, the weirdness, the fierce intelligence, the musical brilliance, the insight, the unexpected tears, that is the music of TEEN.


I don't know what you're doing today, but if you're in a place where you can listen to music, I'm embedding the bandcamp link here. You can listen to the whole goddamn album. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm right. Tell the world what you hear when you listen to TEEN. Tell the world what you feel when you listen to TEEN.



SIDEBAR ABOUT MUSIC CRIT INSIDE BASEBALL STUFF THAT IS KIND OF A DIGRESSION FROM THE MAIN POINT OF THIS ARTICLE, I.E. HOW MUCH WE LIKE THE NEW TEEN ALBUM:

The Guardian gave it three stars today--out of five, because in a universe of infinite stars, most music publications insist five is the highest number of stars imaginable. This is both a metaphor and also literally true. The reviewer wrote that Good Fruit is "stronger on detail than as a unified structure or statement." To which, I say well isn't everything. It's 2019, and you want unity and structure. But then most contemporary music scribblers resemble professors handing out grades more than humans navigating their responses to art, and so they evaluate from on high, longing for some kind of outdated apollonian ideal. We live in chaotic times, times that are, if I may be so bold to suggest, stronger on detail than as a unified structure or statement. But then navigating this post-structural hypermodern era successfully means being able to think on your feet. It requires elasticity and a spirit of play. Children do this effortlessly. And most young people today, who have grown up or come of age under these conditions, are especially adept. But the only young people who get hired to write about music in the visible places are all middle-class, middle-brow, and write like they are middle-aged.

Cult of Personality Crisis

Imagine voting for, or supporting, a US presidential candidate because you identify with them, or even worse, because you like them. These are people who you're never going to meet, who don't give a shit about you in any concrete way beyond whether or not you might (or might not) vote for them--I am willing to grant that some candidates might, and this is a big might, care about you in the abstract, i.e. wanting to make the country you live in a better place.

This blog will be most likely be voting for Bernie Sanders in next year's primary because his policies are most in line with what we think is best for the country. This blog doesn't give a shit about Bernie Sanders, the person. Or any other candidate for that matter. If Sanders steps on a homeless person next week, or if someone in his campaign is caught on video slamming a kitten forcefully against a wall, this wouldn't change our vote--because an election is about voting for a person to do a very specific job. And we feel Sanders not only has positions we can get behind, but has held these positions for a very long time, and worked hard as a mayor, and then as a senator, to advance these causes. It is, for us at least, a remarkably easy decision.

He has also shown an ability to listen to criticism, reflect on it, and get better. This is a rarity in contemporary politics.

And if someone else wins the Democratic nomination, whether by means that we consider fair or unfair, this blog will still vote for the Democratic nominee, because the Republican Party is nothing more than a bad faith virus of cruelty.

I write all this in the futile hope that we can avoid a repeat of the tedious screamfest of the 2016 primary--which is still going on, still tedious, still screaming. But then so much of contemporary politics is sports fans screaming about irrelevant nonsense into the void. It's our way of participating, and signals a lack of faith in the actual mechanisms of the election process, a lack of faith that is incredibly well-founded. Nobody is listening, and so everyone is screaming.

But voting for someone because you like them, or not voting for someone because you don't like them, may be the emptiest reason to vote for someone, and seems like a strange thing to be smugly announcing to your followers (what a term--on Twitter we all get to be cult leaders) across your various social media platforms.

Sarah Swillum - "Crush Island"

To be adrift and lost is to be in the possession of a certain kind of freedom. And with freedom of any kind hard to come by in this the year of our abandonment, glimpses of freedom are not something to be taken lightly. Sarah Swillum is a person who lives in Athens, Georgia, and I hear freedom in every note of their music. Sarah Swillum is looking at our minds, and listening to our conversations, and they are not sure about what they're seeing and hearing. How could they be? Who of us truly even understands ourselves? One can both be amused by the carnival and simultaneously horrified. This is music rooted in a whimsy that is deadly fucking serious.Sarah Swillum understands what it means to be alive as we barrel through this century, which is to say that Sarah Swillum understands that all of us are dying.




Note: The name of this artist may also be JIMJIM. That's how they're being billed at a festival this weekend. The confusion, the identity-flux, only makes this music feel more right to me, more right of this moment as a thing. Go to their bandcamp and shower them with dollars. We spend so much time throwing money at problems, why not try throwing them at a solution? Here's one more if you need convincing.

Cohen Testimony

T'hese are shitty times to live through, but it's one hell of a television show. Or maybe it's a dream. It feels like a dream sometimes, right down to the way nothing ever resolves--the Mueller investigation, Brexit. They just keep going and twisting with false ending after false ending just like a dream.

And today is always a good day to think about the nihilistic cesspool that is the Republican Party, a governing body driven exclusively by its need for power and money at the expense of anything else.