The Tris McCall Report

British Inversion, April 7, 2001

For all I know, the most appropriate moment may have already passed, but before I begin in earnest, a few words about the most omnipresent Britpop radio single in years: Coldplay's inescapable "Yellow." No doubt this seems a leftfield hit to many, and certainly it sounds out of place on hit radio dominated by R&B and sensitive funk-rock crossovers. But rather than an anomaly or pure chance, Coldplay's surprising ability to crack the U.S. market is the most immediate (but certainly not the last) commercial manifestation of Volkswagen's decision to exhume Nick Drake, dust off his treasured, precious and cultish repertoire, and re-dress him as a disembodied celebrity spokesman. Certainly a Nick Drake revival had been in the works for years, even before the Pink Moon advert, but the sudden spike in interest that accompanied the TV spot coupled with the critical and commercial acceptance of Radiohead situated Chris Martin's dreamy, self-absorbed delivery perfectly. There's always been an American market for introspective bedsit moodiness, and "Yellow," coupled with Travis's "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" and the collected works of Thom Yorke, have filled that niche market to overflow. Mope-rock is once again the British Isles' major cultural export.

The end of the exuberant brand of Britpop characterized by Oasis, Kula Shaker, Primal Scream, and the raucous sixties formalists that followed in their wake paralleled the souring of "Cool Britannia" and the loss of faith in the Blair government and the Labour party (and in retrospect, it's tempting to see Damon Albarn's public refusal to vote for Blair, coupled with Blur's sharp turn away from their well-honed retro-Kinks sound as a turning-point for British hit radio). Oasis's music was extroverted, anthemic, deeply public, forward-looking and rooted in history and camaraderie -- - the perfect soundtrack for the disposal of the Tories. But as disillusionment with New Labour reached a crisis point, British songwriters have, on balance, turned away from outward engagement and towards more ruminative, personal concerns, solitary heartbreak ballads, dystopic fantasies, and private music that sounds as if it's playing inside your head.

Pensive, terminally melancholy Nick Drake is the patron saint of this movement, and "Yellow" its fullest realization. Coldplay frontman Chris Martin shares with Drake a penchant for narcissism and desperate tear-jerky lyricism, sung in feathery, sensitive headvoice; the group follows suit with a lush, orchestral rainy-day arrangement. Parachutes features variations on the formula -- - delicate falsetto floated atop a thick bed of slo-mo rhythm guitar, passionate, ambiguous love letters, infectious melodies (though never bright or cheery), stars, the requisite low-stakes jazz moves from the rhythm section, oceans, the full skein of effective-predictable romantic imagery.

So is Coldplay the spearhead of a new generation of mope-rock antiheroes, set to wash up on these shores in time for the economic downturn? Despite my better judgment I have a soft spot for this group and their earnestly hokey single, but I'd still bet against them. While superficially reminiscent of the gloomy champions of yesteryear (Smiths, Cure, Daniel Ash), the most comparable album to Parachutes came from the last great Nick Drake revivalists to dent the American pop charts -- - The Cranberries, whose irritating yet indelible "Linger" shares with "Yellow" a collection of arty vocal affectations, an indeterminate longing, and some extremely similar guitar chords and voicings. I'd expect Coldplay and Martin to exist in uneasy relationship with American corporate radio rock for a few years, just as The Cranberries and Dolores Riordan battled for airspace against heavier wattage before imploding in an ill-advised attempt to forego the Nick Drake trappings and crank up the gain. That means that we can all look forward to hearing "Yellow" revived in tourist bureau commercials for Devon and Cornwall around the year 2008, targeted toward those stalwart Americans who stand perpetually at the ready to partake in the malaise and despondency that Noel Gallagher could not shake his nation free from.

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While only Darren Hayman of Hefner seems brave enough to buck the trend and engage with his own country, several other imaginative British writers have decided to do what Brits regularly do when times are tough on the Home Islands -- get the hell out of England, and write about America. While there are few specific references to Manhattan on Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, the "city" referred to in the title is clearly New York and not London. And we can be sure of this, because look!, there's P.J. Harvey herself staring back at us on the cover from a busy Manhattan intersection, with the faux-jaded expression of a Soho tourist who's just overpaid mightily for her topcoat. What the city has taught her, apparently, is that it's cool to make like Patti Smith whenever possible (though her ridiculously powerful and radio-ready vocals still share more in common with those of Nancy Wilson than most indie pundits are willing to admit), and you can credit her rhythm guitar playing with renewed discipline and inventiveness. The title is a tease: these aren't really stories, though Harvey's concerns do achieve a kind of intertextual velocity, and lean toward a cogent vision of New York City as an powerful engine of liberation and intensity. None of this would matter at all if Harvey hadn't raised her game and come with her most compelling set of songs since Dry -- "This Is Love" compacts "Cinnamon Girl" into three and a half minutes of bruising obsession, and a pure expression of exhilarating lust, while the dazzling "We Float" laces a star-casting hypnotic performance over an ominous piano groove and a post-trip-hop funk beat. Bass, drums, electric piano, distorted guitar, uncomplicated blues melodies, big riffs, plainspoken lyrics -- - this is where rock traditionalism stands in the year 2001. P.J. Harvey came into this game in the early nineties as a bomb-thrower intent on rupturing the edifice of male-dominated rock, but she's stuck around long enough to inherit the institutional mantle from performers like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. It's hard to imagine entrusting it to safer and more capable hands.

Former great Anglo hope Joe Jackson was offered the mantle several times, urinated on it, claimed to want it back, tossed it off of the roof of a twenty story building, spent a few years down on his knees attempting to krazy glue the shards back together, and then abandoned it as worthless, only to keep looking askance at it as he attempted to mold a mantle of his own out of soap and talcum powder. Jackson has spent the better part of the nineties pursuing to completion the sort of projects that most musicians only joke about doing when they're very, very stoned, so if you approached the release of Night & Day II with a certain amount of trepidation or outright horror, I can't really blame you. At face value, a semi-classical reworking and outright sequel to Jackson's most famous album does in fact seem like the sort of sheer rockface that only a fool would dare to climb, but there's honor in hubris, and I will be damned if the old coot doesn't pull it off. Well, for the first half, at least -- Jackson's gotten his hands on the very best analog modeling synthesizers, and unlike the legions of techno artists who think they've reinvented music when they discover how to work the sequencer, he actually knows how to use them. The synth swells on "Glamour And Pain" sweep across a bravely programmed straight beat like a searchlight, and the two-note oscillation on "Dear Mom" builds to a sirenlike intensity and destabilizes the narrative with grand modular weirdness. Even the straightforward piano playing on "Stranger Than You" manages to generate a musical excitement that's been missing in Jackson's recent work, and it's refreshing to hear.

But none of that is what you want to know -- - what you want to know is how Night & Day II compares to the first installment. Well, like P.J. Harvey, Jackson uses photographic images of skyscrapers and street scenes to reinforce and legitimate the music as About Manhattan, and like Harvey, he's a little short on the necessary detail. Many of the references here (alligators in the sewers? The El Mocambo?) feel dated or imported, and Jackson leans heavily on the New York-as-the-land-of-freaks-and-geeks paradigm that achieved full cliché status in, oh, 1985. The original Night & Day was a magnificently realized outsider-under-siege album that, along with Billy Joel's underrated Glass Houses, meticulously elaborated the psychology of harried white New Yorkers. But now it's 2001, and the only white New Yorker under siege is Judi Nathan, and Joe Jackson's attempts to recapture the paranoid vibe of the original article seem misplaced at best. Jackson gets commended for sticking with the drum machine-electric bass-piano/synth-percussion arithmetic of Night & Day, but those craving a reprise of the absurd and brilliant mambo and salsa reworkings ("Cancer," "Target," etc.) are going to be disappointed. Then again, if you're one of those experimental listeners who was willing to put up with The Juliet Letters, this is a whole hell of a lot more musically focused, and quite a bit more thematically coherent, too.

Most European expatriates, British or otherwise, confine their commentary (and their experiences) to the coastal cities, huddling up against Manhattan as if it were a radiator on an cold night. But the incomparable Richard Davies originally hails from rugged Western Australia, and after the release of 1998's stunning Telegraph, he trailblazed across America in a touring van, writing brilliant, elliptical musical dispatches as he traveled. Barbarians, the latest and finest addition to a formidable discography, takes the shape of ten vivid postcards sent to the listener from New Mexico, Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley, the industrial Midwest, the central business districts of Manhattan and Los Angeles, foggy Texas, Upstate New York, and the endless stretches of American highway between the metropolitan areas. Even at his most opaque, Davies has coupled a fascination with technology with a colorful sense of rural nostalgia, and conscientious engagement with the admittedly difficult Barbarians reveals profound and succinct commentary on the division (or to borrow Davies's own devastating metaphor, the "Hadrian's Wall/behind the mall") between plugged America and the poor "barbarian" towns and communities without access to communications networks. Davies writes and sings in a kaleidoscopic, pastoral style that owes as much to classical and film-score composition as it does to The Kinks or Neil Young (the two artists to whom he's most commonly compared) -- but here, he's stripped down his songs to their basic arrangements, and even added some dirt and distortion to underscore his themes. Like all Richard Davies albums, Barbarians might feel underwhelming at first, but unlike the inscrutable Telegraph, there is a tremendously rewarding code of meaning here waiting for listeners with the patience and conscience to unlock it and riddle it through. Believe it -- - not since Alexis DeTocqueville has an outsider written anything so penetrating and essential about America.

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Getting back to a previous sore subject, Damon Gough of Badly Drawn Boy has also been compared to Nick Drake, which is a tremendous stretcheroo, predicated mostly on a few moments of cocktail jazz, soft vocals, and Gough's emotional state (melancholy). Hey, if it was that easy, I'd expect Alfonzo at the Teaneck Holiday Inn to be knocking out a "Northern Sky" or two the next time he sits down to write. By the transitive property of British bedsit artists, Gough has also been compared to Stuart Murdoch, which is at least in the proper ballpark, but still pretty deep in the outfield -- - though they share similar arrangement tastes (organs, acoustic guitar, sundry orchestral instruments), Belle & Sebastian drive implausibly wordy, character-driven narratives through ornate melodic designs. In contrast, Badly Drawn Boy keeps it simple, rarely pushing far past first-degree symbolism and confession; the result, The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is an uneven, but never uninteresting, compendium of tracks of wildly varying length and quality. Considering Gough's indebtedness to high British songwriting tradition, his relative paucity of harmonic ideas might surprise you, and the we-happened-to-have-this-harmonium-lying-in-the-back-of-the studio approach to arrangement, while inspired in its gleeful amateurism, isn't enough to stave off listener fatigue. No, what Gough does well is write singles, slices of invention that brighten up a radio or rock video set with three minute salvos of indiepop ideology -- divine unprofessionalism and sensitivity, and childlike energy. With cheery disregard for sonic fidelity, bedroomy vocals, and a handful of magic tracks, he's almost the ideal artist to encounter over file-sharing software -- - providing you know what titles to search (hint: "Once Around The Block," "Another Pearl"). The Hour Of Bewilderbeast won Britain's Mercury Prize, continuing the institution's tradition of rewarding albums with staggering amounts of filler.

Hefner began as a quintessential bedsit act, even daring to record their first full-length in the same studio where B&S cut Tigermilk, but the irresistible riptide of Darren Hayman's unabashed love for Motown and Stax-Volt has tugged the group into uncharted and turbulent waters. (For those of you who still don't know Hayman, he is, without a doubt, one of the most astonishing and revelatory folk-soul singers in British history, testifying with potent emotional force, quick wit, verbal acuity, a wink to the camera, and utter disregard for pitch, meter, or vocal tone quality.) Atop a rickety frame of intermittent musicianship, Hefner has stacked several full horn arrangements, woodwinds, Memphis and slide guitar, elaborate and theatrical backing vocals including memorable cameos by lead guitarist Jack Hayter's young children, and, for the first time, a developed concept other than Hayman's romantic and sexual misadventures. Which is not to say that We Love The City abandons the usual Hefner fixations -- Hayman merely subordinates his usual immediacy as he looks at his relationships through the prism of London and what it means to him, his generation, his bandmates, and the women he chases around its streets.

From the album's opening gambit -- a title track that's a straight indiepop rewrite of "Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay" -- the attempted intricacy of the guitar part serves notice that Hefner is simultaneously attempting a greater sophistication and a more rigorous engagement with soul idioms. But painstaking self-consciousness and musical competence are uneasy fits for the most direct group in Britpop history, and for the first time, Hefner occasionally sounds unsure and tentative -- while the aching "Good Fruit" wouldn't have sounded out of place on 1999's masterpiece The Fidelity Wars, "Painting And Kissing" is a near miss, a somewhat forced attempt to write a "Hefner classic" according to its basic components rather than organic materials. The big soul production pieces -- particularly the awesome, three-part "Cure For Evil" -- actually work better than the stripped-down indiepop numbers that more closely recall the songs that made Hefner famous, and that's probably because Hayman's heart is in them. The most telling track here is "The Greater London Radio," which sounds like the song Blur was trying to write for The Great Escape, and which situates Hefner in a traffic jam, unable to get home to their girlfriends. On previous Hefner records, see, Hayman has always been in control of the action; here, he's letting things happen to him, and if the resulting stance is more mature and reflective, it's also less gripping, and less passionate. I still think they're the greatest band in the world, but they're also plainly in transition; the next album should be fascinating.

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Just as Hefner seems to have outgrown British indiepop, the subgenre is plainly fissuring again into two distinct camps -- groups like Baxendale and Looper, who've followed the lead of Bob Wratten towards light synthesizers and a tentative new wave revivalism, and more defiantly retro groups taking their cues from sixties art film soundtracks. The cinema-pop movement is not new -- what would trip-hop have been without the Bond-theme archive to loot? -- but it is newly codified, in response to the positive British reception of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs and The Flaming Lips's Soft Bulletin. (Chris Martin is a vocal Flaming Lips fan, in case you couldn't tell). As the mope-rock revival rejects the outward public engagement of Britpop in favor of expressions of shoegazing solipsism, cinema-pop replaces close writing of characters and journalistic scribbling that characterized indiepop with atmospherics, mild psychedelia, nostalgia, and preposterously stylized vocal performances.

The results have, predictably, been more often gruesome than tolerable, but certain performers who have been stalking this terrain for a few years have managed to rise above the limitations of the genre. Despite the suggestive name and remarkably consistent arrangement philosophy, Cinerama has always been more a vehicle for the elaboration of David Gedge's clever romantic fantasies than anything else, and it's a testament to the consistency of his tone (and maybe the persistence of his complaints) that his character doesn't ever get lost amid the sweeping, b-movie settings. It's also helped that Gedge -- formerly the ideologue behind the Wedding Present -- has scored himself one hell of a backing group, including the remarkably empathetic rhythm section of Simon Pearson and Terry DeCastro and a cast of thousands of ace players on strings and horns. This unrestrained virtuosity makes listening to any Cinerama track a joy -- none more so than the letter-perfect ABBA reconstruction of "Dance, Girl, Dance," included on the odds-and-sods This Is Cinerama, an American-released compilation of singles and B-sides that juxtaposes Gedge's best ideas with his worst. He's an album artist despite his own intentions, so you're better off hunting down a copy of Disco Volante, the most recent full-length. Here, Gedge's heartbreak logic and sonic vocabulary unfold at a properly governed pace, with self-deprecating couplets ("My heart is pounding/How pathetic is this sounding," or perhaps "That sounds more like a job for Superman/Not the lazy slob that you think I am") and humorously pathetic entreaties serving as the mile markers.

Death By Chocolate establishes cinematic credentials with earnest covers of "Who Needs Wings To Fly?" (from The Flying Nun) and "If You Want To Sing Out Sing Out" (Cat Stevens's hippie-libertarian love theme from Harold & Maude) and bouncy Farfisa cascades that arrive punctually at Carnaby Street via the Austin Powers trailer. If that sounds gimmicky and pro-forma, well, it is, and if that's all there were to Death By Chocolate, it'd be exactly as disposable as it probably means to be. But no amount of familiarity with spy flick soundtracks can prepare you for schoolgirl Angie Tillett's acid-drenched voice and superpsychedelic spoken word reveries. Bridging instrumental bits with alphabetical lists, color associations, counting rhymes, and one wide-eyed and magnificent ode to different brands of British candy, Tillett elevates this project so vertiginously you may black out from oxygen deprivation. Alternately hilarious and terrifying, her brilliant performances reach a dizzying apex with a wide-awake cover of The Smoke's notorious drug anthem "My Friend Jack" that's so insidiously subversive in its innocence that it's likely to be banned by the BBC all over again. I confess that I love this record a bit more than its purely musical virtues warrant, but it's so radically unlike anything else out there right now, and Tillett is so refreshingly imaginative, that Death By Chocolate hasn't left my CD changer in weeks. Here's a reminder to all the producers attempting to generate mind-expanding effects with effects processors and phasing: psychedelia, like everything else, is discursively produced, and if you really want to be trippy, you've got to use words. And a voice like Angie Tillett's doesn't hurt, either.

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Muffin Spencer's voice may not be as arresting as Angie Tillett's, but it's pretty remarkable in its own right, stuttering like a fineline rotoscoped image over angular, sampled grooves that suggest what Elastica might have sounded like if they'd pirated Kool Moe Dee's catalog instead of Wire's. Much has been made of Spencer's semi-famous brother -- who I won't name here -- and Brassy's spazzy, enjoyable Got It Made is exactly the sort of album you might expect a little sister to drop as she steps bravely out of the shadow of an older sibling: dripping with attitude, sneering, energetic, pouty, hands-on-hips defiant. The primary idiom is hip-hop, complete with big bass, samples, scratching, and answering machine messages, but unlike most Brit acts that dabble in Bronx-style revivalism, Brassy has the beats to back up its aspirations -- Got It Made boasts a wicked kick drum sound and a rich, eighties-sounding snare that splashes all over the track with vibrant color. "I Can't Wait" is probably the best of it, as Spencer whines over a loping, elastic bass groove and a whipsaw start-stop drum pattern, but the riotous "Parkside" and "Good Times" stand out as well. More problematically, Got It Made runs seventeen tracks, and they essentially show you everything they're going to during the first four, so while Brassy is perfectly fantastic in limited doses, redundancy does set in hard after protracted exposure.

Moreover, no matter what Beck junkies want to tell you, the methodology -- white kids approximating hip-hop and splicing Bomb Squad production tropes into alternarock -- became passe around 1992 and the release of Jesus Jones's second album. In order to be truly radical these days, musicians are going to have to begin exploring some of the mustier attics of rock history, clearing away the cobwebs from genres and approaches that have been collectively disdained. Before platform shoes came back into style, someone had to be ready to risk the ridicule of their peers by wearing them in public again, and since that someone is inevitably French, it's unsurprising that it was Air, France's best-received musical export, who relegitimated prog-rock approaches and widdly-widdly analog synth solos for hipsters wordwide. Daft Punk owes much of their critical and commercial traction to the fifteen second French pop vogue that followed the release of Moon Safari, and they were, at first, principally camp followers, fusing electronica with radio pop in a perfectly acceptable, tame, decidedly non-French manner. Back again for seconds, about half of Daft Punk's latest, Discovery, does indeed echo their earlier work; the other half, however, utilizes archaic vocoder settings and guitar and synth pad sounds you might remember from Miami Vice, and bears a startling resemblance (and I am not kidding here) to Kool & The Gang, Hall & Oates, and Lionel Richie.

Can this be happening? Does Daft Punk really want to be the Sloan of dance music? No less a philosopher of historical dialectic than Karl Marx once claimed that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as disco, and personally, if I've got to hear a guitar solo that could have been ripped from a Foreigner song, I'd prefer that it happen over a funky beat. More to the point, the early eighties party fabrications here are relentlessly intoxicating in their conception and execution, particularly the fabulously cheesy "Digital Love" and the bracing Corey Hart-with-a-sampler "Face To Face." Many of the hyperactively sugar-fixed production choices are worth listening to simply because of their audacity, but once the novelty wears off, the musical intelligence, performance energy, and sheer good humor persists. There will be better albums released in 2001, but there won't be any braver ones, and for that, Daft Punk deserves unanimous approbation and respect.

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Certain critical assessments are predictable: any basketball team that plays with hustle and muscle and fire and desire will be appreciated by Walt Frazier as surely as Howard Stern will give thumbs-up to any movie with a protracted lesbian sex scene. Similarly, any synthpop group inspired enough to use "don't ever antagonize the horn" as a chorus will get positively reviewed by Tris McCall. Tarwater justifies the Pynchon reference by maintaining a psychoactive level of hallucinatory discourse throughout the balance of Animals, Suns & Atoms, interspersing phrases of emotional intensity with dreamlike imagery. An electronica act in name only, Tarwater's music is far more comparable to New Order's more experimental tracks (or perhaps the more allusive half of Upstairs At Erics), than to that of their more instrumental labelmates. "All Of The Ants Left Paris" elaborates the approach at its most basic -- deadpan vocals, cryptic and evocative lyrics, synth pulses over straightforward drum tracks -- while "Song Of The Moth" and "Seven Ways To Fake A Perfect Skin" incorporate disembodied backing vocals and unsettling noises to spine-chilling effect. A perfect late night song cycle; one extremely liable to seep into dreams.

Tarwater is best-known stateside as Nick Currie's favorite group, and Nick Currie is best known stateside and worldwide as Momus, the most intellectually penetrating and theoretically engaged pop songwriter to emerge from the British Isles since Green Gartside. Coming off Stars Forever, 1999's staggering meditation on fame and impermanence (and a newsworthy exercise in patronage pop), Currie temporarily relocated to Orchard Street in Chinatown, where he set to work examining the implications of naturalism and the worldwide fascination with folk and country forms in a highly technological and sophisticated era. Complicating the search for origins and troubling those who fetishize sincerity, Folktronic satirizes, cajoles, sloganeers, offers soundbites and inspiring verse, and yet somehow manages to fuse the rhetoric with Currie's most engaging collection of melodies since 1988's legendary Tender Pervert. But while previous Momus albums occasionally overreach their argumentative grasp, Folktronic stays on point throughout; perhaps because it addresses the crucial controversy at the heart of Currie's project -- the impossibility of lifting masks and locating "originals." He's having fun with us, as always -- nobody could write a synthesized country and western ballad about a legendary HTML coder and not smile straight through it -- but there's an overwhelming seriousness to Folktronic that's been absent from the most recent Momus records, a sense of raised stakes gaining precedence over whimsy. He's still more inclined to tell you everything you didn't want to know about his penis than he is to produce a scalding condemnation, but he's a humorist (and true supplicant) at heart, and his wit is multifaceted -- it can be genuinely heartbreaking one minute, and downright silly the next. Currie has also developed himself as a singer and analog synthesist, and his performances here are probably the best he's ever committed to wax, or more accurately, to the hard drive of his desktop computer. His attempts at "fake folk" aren't really that dissimilar to his previous attempts at analog baroque or fake Eurodisco; what's changed here is the relentlessness of his examination of the concept of "fakeness," and his conclusion, difficult to dispute, that artificiality is neither disreputable, nor, in this cultural climate, avoidable.

Why does what I'm saying hurt you? I didn't say that we were through.