The Tris McCall Report

British Inversion, August 2, 2002

The Unselfconscious French?

After I've listened to an album ten times or so -- after it's occupied my attention long enoughthat I can start forming something like a critical judgment about it -- I often like to go to a search engine, plug in the title, and see what other reviewers are saying about it. This is weirdly pathological behavior, I realize, but I like to pretend that we're living in a community of correlated commentary, where the new Jay-Z or Kid Rock release might generate discourse that is salutary to our collective consciousness. Anyway, I've listened to the new Air album many more times than ten, and it's occupied my thoughts over the past three months much more frequently than has, say, the desire to eat, so I've had ample time to get online and scan critical reaction. And since 10,000 Hz Superstar is so rich, so perplexing, and so (it seems to me) worthy of commentary, I've probably read close to two hundred reviews of the damned thing, searching for some kind of exegesis that might help riddle out its mysteries.

Around review one hundred and fifty, it occurred to me that I was dissatisfied. Critical response, as it so often is, seemed to be divided into two camps, which, on closer inspection turned out to be different tents in the same camp: bleeding-hearts who said this sure as hell doesn't sound like Moon Safari, but let's let the frogs have their experimental fun, and formalist techno-hawks who said this sure as hell doesn't sound like Moon Safari, and let's wring their necks. Now, I liked Moon Safari fine -- any album that strains so unapologetically to sound like Yes or Wish You Were Here is okay by me -- but I found it, ultimately, an empty vessel; all superficial charms and pyrotechnics, pretty textures but very little thematic coherence. 10,000 Hz Superstar has thematic coherence in spades; it's just not the sort of message we've come to expect from Air, a group we rely on for studied detachment, arch cool, and arty, futuristic mood music. Consequently, not one of the two hundred reviews I read used the word "satire."

I could be totally wrong here. Tracks like "How Does It Make You Feel?" and "Radio #1" might be serious, entirely on the level, every bit as earnest and forthright-blasé as Moon Safari's celebrated "You Make It Easy." You could argue that two hundred against one represents a pretty steep ratio, even by entrenched Tris McCall contrarian standards; that, in effect, two hundred Air fans can't be wrong. And I'd be inclined to agree with you, though I'm not certain that the two hundred reviewers who've engaged with 10,000 Hz Superstar are actually Air fans. Hell, I am not sure I am an Air fan, either; even after countless spins, these guys still seem cold, impersonal, and generally nasty. But if I am wrong and this album is not a satire -- one confected by self-styled aesthetes who found themselves caught up in the music industry and who were offended to the point of hostility by its rapacity, shallowness, and ethic of disposability -- then it is without a doubt a mindless and even stupid record, closer to the vapid glitter of Morcheeba than to the puissance of the classic Pink Floyd albums that Air strives to emulate.

Which is not to deny that 10,000 Hz Superstar contains moments of pure textural bliss. "Radian" washes in on undulating string-synth pads and an unearthly, humming female vocal before flutes carry a gorgeous melody past cascading harps and a most breathtaking acoustic guitar lead; in a move that is pure Air, the original melody is recapitulated in ghost-form on a flanged piano, and the effect is chilling. Somewhat less successful is the closing instrumental "Caramel Prisoner," which buries terrific harmony ideas beneath an interminable soundscape that feels like the sort of thing you could do if you were given a half an hour to screw around in the analog modeling synth showroom at Sam Ash. But there's no denying the proto-techno starkness and production accomplishment of "Lucky And Unhappy," where the throb of a bass synthesizer pulse reinforces a feeling of destabilization and propels the song toward a whistling fade. Best of all, "People In The City" integrates acoustic guitar with magma bubbles of analog synth feedback, sirens, Dark Side Of The Moon piano, and the sort of stuttering vocal effects that made "Kelly Watch The Stars" and "Sexy Boy" instant neo-prog classics.

These days, though, everybody's got a NordLead or two hooked up to their home studios, and inflationary pressure on scintillating soundscapes has devalued their worth a bit. These aren't the tropes that people are going to remember 10,000 Hz Superstar for, anyway; what characterizes this album is its manifest and hostile irreverence toward trends and current gimmicks in electronic music and disposable radio pop. The opener, "Electronic Performers," sends up Kraftwerk-epigones and "am-I-a-man-or-am-I-a-robot" faux-ambivalence; "we need to use envelope filters/to say how we feel," Julian Dunckel deadpans through a vocoder -- but no electronic processor in existence can mask his naked antipathy. "How Does It Make You Feel?," without a doubt the funniest song every written about cybersex, finds the synthetic voice from OK Computer (and proliferated by Radiohead imitators everywhere) intoning cheesy love sentiments over a bass and artificial-string setting that sounds like futuristic porno music: "I would be happy with just one minute in your arms/let's have an extended play together." The most bitter song on an exceedingly bitter album, "Radio #1" borrows the groove from "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" for a venomous salvo at commercial radio, interrupted at its conclusion by Jason Falkner in the role of a clueless deejay. Kindred spirit Beck lends his voice and some of his characteristic iconography to "The Vagabond" -- together, the three ironists poke fun at Old West mythology and Americanism in general -- the track ends with Hansen whooping in an outrageous falsetto through a vocal effect that makes him sound as if he's gargling with sound waves. Straddling the Rodney Dangerfield line between hilarious and ridiculous, "Sex Born Poison" savages the Japanese-kitten fetishism of artists like Momus, as SuGar and Yumiko from Tokyo's Buffalo Daughter lace erotic absurdities over a wet, squelchy synthesizer: "meet my desire sensors/my atom juice of joy/you want to fuse my affective circuits." "Wonder Milky Bitch" (a shot at Belgian techno-explorers Hooverphonic?) returns to country music mockery, as Dunckel, sounding as brain-dead as he can muster, relates a fragmentary story about getting a blowjob from a "country girl" who "came to me with her muddy boots/she destroyed all my carpet"; here, as elsewhere on 10,000 Hz Superstar, it feels distinctly as if Air is seeking personal revenge against Serge Gainsbourg. Beck returns for "Don't Be Light," an arch reconstruction of bedroom techno replete with a meaningless lyric, a sports-Sunday synthesizer riff, and a guitar solo straight out of Daft Punk's playbook of pastiche.

And if I'm incorrect in my assumptions -- if none of these songs are meant to be parodies, if 10,000 Hz Superstar isn't the work of a couple of continental jokers who've come to the conclusion that their peers are mooks with hopelessly unsophisticated relationships to technology, in thrall to simplistic, childish associations -- then I'm forced to adopt the conclusion that Air consists of really stupid guys, guys who think that "you don't wear cosmetic/you don't like arithmetic" is a couplet worthy of worldwide release and circulation. That's inconsistent with everything we know about Dunckel and Godin, and, frankly, I'd rather believe they are arrogant, vicious pricks than dim bulbs with idiot savant-capacities for melody and sonic texture. And the fact that 10,000 Hz Superstar has not been received as a work of satire only reinforces the sense I have that we've all been bamboozled by these guys; that they're having a good laugh at us as they throw stones at our popular culture from behind the placid cover of Moon Safari, an album we all felt had been made by naifs living in a cave with an analog synthesizer and a copy of Meddle. I recognize that Air did everything they possibly could to reinforce that assumption, so let me disrobe the emperor here: France is the most self-conscious, ironic, and arch culture in the world. How in hell are French musicians -- from Air to Daft Punk to Letitia Sadier -- getting away with posing as earnest champions of disingenuousness? Don't be fooled, they're on the attack, and sometimes with ruthless effectiveness.

Speaking of Sadier, Stereolab is back with another album, their seventeenth in the past year an a half. Hmm, perhaps it just feels that way. For a group with a reputation for sophisticated Marxist politics and elaborate arrangements, there's always been something surprisingly brainless about Stereolab, something thoughtless about their willingness to tether sketchy revolutionary sentiments to middlebrow cocktail-party background music. At their worst, they've been more than willing to wallow in soporific ambience, looping insipid two or three note melodies over static backdrops (and occasional backdrops of static). Recent records have been marred by repetitiveness (Emperor Tomato Ketchup) or bweepy incoherence (Dots And Loops); but even when the group's ideologues lack ideas, the ace rhythm section and outside arrangement assistance -- usually from fellow AM-gold experimentalist Sean O'Hagan -- generally has been enough to sustain interest. Or at least it has for me.

You, yourself, may not be an analog synthesizer junkie, or even a leftist; in which case, you probably greeted the release of Sound-Dust with the kind of pop-culture-goes-on-endlessly shrug usually reserved for the Steel Wheels tour or the latest Sweet Valley High novel. But if you did care in the first place, you'd do well to re-engage -- this is their most consistently listenable album since Mars Audiac Quintet, and certainly the most musically interesting since Transient Noise Bursts. Like Air, Stereolab traffics in the juxtaposition of sonic textures, and also like Air, Stereolab has a remarkable ability to create gorgeous sounds and preserve them on tape; where Tim Gane and Sadier differ from Dunckel and Godin is in chord vocabulary (broader) and tone (giddier, goofier, more playful). Here, Gane has retired many of his vintage synths in favor of string settings and horn charts; if the orchestration sounds more conventional, the song structures most certainly aren't. "Spacemoth" begins in a stagger, all Moog cascades and choppy rhythms, before exploding into a gleeful riot of trombones and drum fills; "Captain EasyChord" begins a propulsive piano-and-bass groove before dissolving into a clip-clop nether of synthesizer, organ, and unidentifiable noises. Treated harp and piano, ghostly backing voices and tape effects frame the longing and pain of "The Black Arts," while "Hallucinex" borrows an arrangement concept from O'Hagan's "Cuckoo's Out," winding low brass around staggered woodwinds, echoes, and gentle harmony vocals. "Double Rocker" slowly emerges from a haze of effected horns and distant organ to ride on the crest of a mesmerizing drum and bass groove crowned by a dizzying vibraphone solo; here, as elsewhere on Sound-Dust, Gane displays his ability to transform songs at their midpoint, masterfully altering tempo, tone, and mood while preserving coherence. Finest of all is "Nothing To Do With Me," a creepy narrative with an unforgettable, sweeping chorus; it's a straightforward (which is not to say uncomplicated) pop song, and it might be the best thing the group has ever recorded. Sadier helps out with an unusually intricate and affecting set of melodies -- she still sounds lazy at times, but that's her approach; I hate it, too, but there's a long tradition of blissed-out French chanteuses that she's drawing on here, and I'm willing to suspend my own distaste in the name of the new global unity we're all supposed to be cultivating.

Even more commendable than the improvement in melody is the willingness Stereolab displays on this record to push their experimental and omnivorous arrangement sensibility into the treacherous realm of pseudoclassical orchestration; much of Sound-Dust resembles the work of Eric Matthews and other chamber-pop luminaries more than it does the movie soundtracks that the group's music ordinarily evokes. The move pays musical dividends -- not only does Sound-Dust sound at once more sophisticated and conceptually tighter than any of Stereolab's previous records, this may be one of the only pop albums ever to successfully extend the harmonic sophistication of Joni Mitchell's middle-period space-jazz explorations. And Stereolab being Stereolab, almost every song features moments of breathtaking sonic beauty; precious seconds when the clouds part and an organ or guitar shines with astonishing luminescence. More than a decade into their career, Gane and Sadier have finally arrived at a formula fascinating enough to justify their ambient experimentation -- and maybe even their ideology.

Variations Within The Field Mice Legacy

Frequent readers of this column are, at this point, probably all too familiar with my pet peeve. No, not my distaste for Radiohead -- that's more of a hatchet-wielding mania than a peeve -- I mean my annoyance at Belle & Sebastian comparisons, and my unwillingness to accept that the latest soft-voiced bedsit songwriter from the Midlands has any resemblance, musical or otherwise, to Stuart Murdoch. Since I am tired of making this argument, I'm going to lay it out one final time, and offer a constructive alternative: Murdoch writes, and B&S play, elaborate tragi-comic story-songs with complex characters that echo the lighter side of the Smiths ("Half A Person," "The Boy With The Thorn In His Side," etc.) and which prominently feature figurative language, wordy formulations and literary strategies, topical references, and elaborated class politics. Trembling Blue Stars do not. The Kings Of Convenience do not. Ashley Park do not, Death Cab For Cutie do not, Badly Drawn Boy does not. Baby Bird, Cinerama, and Kleenex Boy Wonder do not, Tram, The Lucksmiths and The Clientele do not, The Bluetones most definitely do not. Mojave 3 does not, the Gentle Waves do not, The Snow Patrol do not, Kid Silver and Roller Skate Skinny do not. Everybody else does not, either, so let's cut out all the Belle & Sebastian comparisons, guys.

Murdoch is also a much better songsmith than anybody to whom he's usually compared; and one with unparalleled skill at crafting memorable uptempo melodies. It's true that he sings his lyrics in a characteristically breathy tenor, but hell, so does everyone from Donovan to Momus to Eric Idle; Murdoch didn't originate that style any more than Robert Plant made up standing with one foot on the monitor speaker and screeching his lungs out. It's a private-sounding style, but beyond the intimacy is a deeply public voice: from "I Could Be Dreaming" to "Me And The Major," "The Boy With The Arab Strap" to "Women's Realm," Murdoch's songs are most frequently motivated by rage at specific social conditions or predicaments. They're forwardly engaged, much less about the feelings of the narrator and more about the consequences and trajectory of the narrator's actions in the outside world. No, I think what people mean to suggest with these B&S comparisons is that they're reminded not of B&S but of the Field Mice -- of the introspection and fragility of the Field Mice, the personal quality of the sketchy, confessional narratives, the bare-bones arrangements, the rejection of rock bombast in favor of subtlety and shading, the emphasis on prettiness, the hurt feelings and unrequited love, the sublimation of masculinity. The singer's world is circumscribed by the four somber walls of his bedroom, and outside the window, it's invariably raining.

Suburban Light, the debut singles collection by the aformentioned Clientele, may have the highest precipitation level of any release in the history of pop -- rain falls in most of these thirteen songs, (including "Rain" and "Monday's Rain") and the album cover features a blurry photograph of a drizzly, tree-lined street. It's tempting to assume that songwriter and penitent Alastair Maclean would have chosen to increase the internal variation were this not a compilation of extant singles, but that's probably wrong -- it's a damp, overcast feeling he wants to communicate, and he's going to be damned sure he gets that across to the listener. The guitar and vocal tone are drenched in echo (Suburban Light is well over the legal limit for reverb, so dry-recording purists might do well to steer clear) and Maclean's own performances are whispered, yearning, confessional, and not a little overwrought. If the collective effect is a bit maddening, it also offers its share of brilliant illuminations and priceless expressions of passion: "We Could Walk Together," drowned in reverb, still manages to evoke a misty breathlessness, "Joseph Cornell" welds desperate singing to an arrangement reminiscent of the best tracks on Robyn Hitchcock's Groovy Decoy, "An Hour Before The Light" blooms into a perfect chorus of tambourine and guitar. Throughout, simple musical ideas that initially seem thinly sketched develop unexpected and occasionally moving dimensions, and Maclean's lyrics, while usually single-minded, trace some unforgettable and impressionistic images of love and desire -- the shadow of a hand, a bus in the rain, a face lit by streetlights.

With a title evoking southern-boogie, or at the very least a Primal Scream outtakes set, The Reindeer Section's misleadingly-named Y'All Get Scared Now, Ya Hear! would seem unlikely to offer variations on the Field Mice formula. Yet this feels more like a Bob Wratten project than the last Trembling Blue Stars album did -- brief, elliptical ruminations on heartbreak and longing, gracefully sung over acoustic guitar and occasional synthesizer and piano. There's even the requisite funky number (titled "Raindrop," of course), and since Scottish law now requires that Aidan Moffat must do a guest appearance on every new release, a derivative spoken word track towards the end of the album. But none of that distinguishes Y'All Get Scared Now, Ya Hear!; what establishes this record as indispensable is a run of three breathtaking love songs -- sequenced for collective impact, and culminating in "If Everything Fell Quiet," a fragile, meditative coupling of loneliness and devotion. Gary Lightbody's singing floats above these mixes like a cirrus cloud, and instrumental textures are captured lovingly in excellent sonic fidelity. The scrape of the brushes across a snare head, the precise articulation of fingers on bass strings, the breathy catch in Lightbody's voice; all these elements contribute to an irreducible sense of intimacy and inevitability, the feeling that The Reindeer Section is playing these songs somewhere deep inside your head.

That's an intimacy that Damon Gough of Badly Drawn Boy achieved at times on The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, his critically-lauded debut album. Ultimately, however, Gough proved too restless and experimental to sustain the Field Mice formula -- his songs would frequently start with an introspective tenor, and then struggle towards something more odd and unsettling. Alfie, Gough's first signing to his vanity label, displays a similar restlessness; much of If You Happy With You Need Do Nothing, the young group's unfocused but ambitious and intermittently exciting debut, navigates a uncharted middle ground between Trembling Blue Stars and Gomez. And while many of these tracks lean dangerously close to the hippie shapelessness that characterizes Gomez at its most incoherent and drugged, Alfie also shares Ben Ottewell's gift for muted classic-rock grandeur; the disciplined pop songs here are singalong delights. "2 Up 2 Down" bops along with a bass and trumpet shuffle, nudged laterally by a scratchy electric rhythm guitar that stumbles into unlikely voicings; "You Make No Bones", which could easily be slotted into Liquid Skin between "California" and "Devil May Ride," sounds and feels like the Field Mice covering "Uncle John's Band" -- and yes, that means it's fantastic and essential. Judicious use of strings, harp, horns, analog synthesizer and acoustic instruments elevates and variegates many of these mixes; to their credit, this group is not afraid to take a lo-fi orchestral approach to intimate, personal material. On "It's Just About The Weather," the purest attempt here at a Britpop exploration, the group stands Travis's famous mope-rock complaint on its head -- rather than complaining or philosophizing about the omnipresence of bad weather, Alfie urgently repeats their desire to "get out of the rain." And unlike Lightbody, MacLean, and others working within the Field Mice legacy who accept the rain as a natural consequence of their insularity -- the inevitable and appropriate metaphor for their seclusion and introspection -- Alfie recognizes the seductiveness of their own solipsism, and rejects indulgence in misfortune. Which makes this shambolic, scattered, meandering, dreamy young group a decent bet to become the first Field Mice formula act to actually merit a comparison to Belle & Sebastian.

At some unspecified, impossibly distant point in the future, mind you.

The Return of Two Great Shape-Changers

From The Beatles to The Byrds to Boogie Down Productions, a hallmark of greatness at the highest level has always been an ability to radically vary arrangement and songwriting styles while retaining the unmistakable and characteristic stamp of the group's personality -- say, for instance, the aesthetic integrity necessary to release a country album, and then a punk rock album, and then an album of string quartet music, and for the overarching project to be internally coherent that nobody could misrecognize any of it as anything other than Elvis Costello's music. The vagaries of niche marketing (and identity politics) have all but obliterated the stylistic shape-changer from the pop landscape. When we purchase our copy of the new Jewel CD, we can be assured we're going to get Jewel-brand entertainment and not speed metal, space-rock, or jazz-fusion -- such are the strict parameters of quality control in a highly specialized and highly leveraged industry. But the finest and most ingenious writers and musicians will always find a way to be protean, and when they do, they invariably confuse only those who weren't paying close enough attention in the first place (and yes, that does generally mean their backers in the music industry).

When Hefner first emerged from Scotland, their cavalier approach to recording (coupled with a lack of evident testosterone) got them compared to Belle & Sebastian and other bedsit artists. As with everybody else, the B&S comparison was way off base, but not for the usual reasons; from Hefner's first singles, it was apparent that yelping frontman and songwriter Darren Hayman had no interest in mimicking Murdoch's introspective whisper. He wanted to be Al Green, or the closest thing to Al Green he could be, which, since he had no ability whatsoever to sing in tune or in time, was never going to be all that close. But what Hayman did have -- and most certainly continues to have -- was the power of infallible conviction, which, coupled with Hefner's increasing (and shocking) believability as a folk-soul act, quickly established Hayman as one of the most remarkable and emotionally affecting singers in the crowded, brilliant skein of British popular music. Over the course of two monumental albums -- The Fidelity Wars and We Love The City -- Hayman and Hefner established a rock voice that was urgent, scratchy, humorous, lyrical when necessary, always geeky-soulful, and wholly their own; tinny-sounding sandpaper guitars, detailed stories about Hayman's love affairs with women and with London, and over-the-top, eyeball-bursting performances. The addition of Jack Hayter on slide guitar bestowed competency and suggested a commitment to naturalism that was never really there -- Hefner didn't record quickly and with simple instrumentation because they were looking for authenticity, it recorded quickly because the urgency of Hayman's approach demanded it. Early Hefner recordings felt closer to the slapdash enthusiasm of Greetings From Asbury Park than to Wilco, or Gillian Welch's studied attempts to reproduce a down-home feel through studio craftsmanship.

Nonetheless, in a climate where nobody blinks when roots rock and "country" music gets recorded through quantizers, hypercompression and SoundTools software, rawness will generally be ascribed not to incompetence, but to a principled technophobia. Many considered Hefner's unwillingness to fix lousy drum tracks and out-of-tune vocals evidence of strident neo-Luddism (or just a fetishized purity), and as their albums have become subsequently glossier and more "produced," some old fans have felt betrayed. Now, I have no firsthand evidence here, but when Hefner released "Alan Bean," the first single from Dead Media, I am sure that the howling on the moors was deafening -- here was a track built entirely of synthesizers, treated programmed drums, an uncharacteristically placid performance by Hayman filtered through heavy vocal effects, and a lyric about astronauts. Had Hefner turned their backs on everything that made them unique and characteristic?

Well, no. On closer inspection, Dead Media, which does indeed take the "Alan Bean" arrangement arithmetic as its template, is in no way inconsistent with anything Hefner has previously recorded. Hayman has always used vintage synthesizers and electric piano as coloring and shading instruments, commentating from the sidelines as the rhythm guitar handles the play-by-play; Dead Media simply flips that equation, rubber-cementing electronic arpeggiators and thick, wobbly square-wave patterns into the center of these mixes. Hefner approaches all instruments similarly -- as chaos-enabling accompaniment to Hayman's narratives -- so it's unsurprising that they've become fixated on Korgs and Moogs, the most destabilizing and loopy instruments anybody has yet invented. As if to prove the point, Hayter's slide guitar joins with Hayman's synths, simultaneously suggesting the harmonic convergence of retro and futuristic tropes and rendering the whole controversy ridiculous: these are all instruments in the purest sense, implements for the communication of meaning. And while Hayman's metaphors have shifted, his lyrics haven't strayed from his great themes -- the negotiation between freedom and responsibility, passion and conventionality, the search for excitement and stimulation on the edge of danger. Much of Dead Media concerns the desire and consequences of shedding baggage, emotional and otherwise, the brutal difficulty identifying what is necessary and what is "junk." Hayman has indeed tamed his ungodly yelp a bit (though it does come unchained from time to time -- - check the outro to "King Of Summer"), and that choice befits the synthpop genre, but by no means has he sacrificed his soul-man credentials. He's just taking a different approach, best in evidence on "When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines"; more controlled if not detached, more tuneful if never exactly pretty, more lighthearted if never without a knowing irony. And while Hayman never did much with his electric guitar beyond dragging the signal through the crappiest amplifiers he could find, he's turned out to be an inventive and occasionally impressive synthesist, more comfortable with envelope filters and low-frequency oscillators than he ever was with six strings and a distortion pedal. But technophobes, don't fret: this old nutcase plays his synths out of tune and out of time, too.

As Darren Hayman and Hefner have moved further away from any evident naturalism, Jason Pierce's Spiritualized, a group so studio-savvy that they intentionally recorded their second album out of phase to create maximum sonic disorientation, has been taking giant steps in the opposite direction. Early Spiritualized efforts featured synths and guitars processed beyond recognition, sonic experiments so rich and byzantine that following the trajectories of the sound waves and phasing on the effects was often more entertaining than engaging with the songs themselves. In 1997, Pierce reined in his proclivity for sonic indulgence a bit (but just a bit) in favor of narrative coherence and some songcraft; the result was the most ambitious and fully-realized rock album of the decade, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.

Never a musician who'd settle for guitar/bass/drums when guitar/bass/drums/synths/horns/strings/gospel choir/treated harmonica would do, Pierce has always chased after huge arrangements and colossal productions; Ladies And Gentlemen featured a cast of thousands and a recording ethos that shared more with Richard Wagner than the Rolling Stones. Returning in 2001 with Let It Come Down, Pierce has followed his instinct for classical drama to its logical conclusion: full and actual orchestral arrangement. And no, this isn't the sort of thing you get on those New York Philharmonic Plays The Music Of Metallica records; rather, Pierce has elected to utilize his huge orchestra much as he once used his digital processors, tracing the sound of his favorite effects back to their theoretical origins, strings slightly out of time to create a phase shift, brass in synchrony for ring modulation, woodwinds stuttering, trippy like a tape loop. Many have attempted to use electronics to replicate the sound and feel of "authentic" acoustic instruments. Jason Pierce is the only visionary crazy enough to use acoustic orchestral instruments to replicate the sound of electronics.

The songwriting also continues to crystallize around traditional structures; he's still loath to commit time to a standard three-minute pop recording that doesn't include a lengthy outro for The London Community Gospel Choir, but Pierce seems increasingly willing to jettison his hipster aversion to unusual chords and elaborate melodies as he expands his palette. A few of the tracks on Let It Come Down contain harmonic elements and chord progressions most closely associated with Burt Bacharach, "The Straight And The Narrow" could be mistaken for a Verve song, "Stop Your Crying" (the single) wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to the next Meg Ryan romantic comedy. None of this is to suggest that Let It Come Down eschews rave-ups -- "The Twelve Steps" is, if anything, even more ferocious than Ladies And Gentlemen's nostril-clearing "Electricity." Pierce rarely buries his own guitar in the mix; he set out to make a real rock record here, and he has succeeded. As always, the lyrics are, superficially, about substance abuse; while many will miss the clever wordplay and wickedly dry humor, the metaphors for desperation, altered states, and transcendence have never been more apparent in his work. Pierce is the only genuinely gospel-influenced writer working in modern rock -- not only does he understand how to build a rock song from gospel underpinnings, he fully comprehends the essence of the form, and feels it so earnestly that he is able to communicate that essence to a secular audience. "Won't Get To Heaven (The State I'm In)" is no fiction -- Pierce may or may not believe in God, but he believes in redemption and in his own frailty, and over the course of the most exhausting and exhilarating eight minutes in modern rock, he brings the full weight of his own dizzying talents to bear on the matter, and only a terminal hardass could fail to be moved.

Not Every Return Is A Happy One

After the unstable magic of Mad For Sadness, I rather expected the new Arab Strap full-length to stand among the year's best. Instead, The Red Thread is a tremendous disappointment; monochromatic and sleepy, and containing only flashes of the obsessive mania that makes the group's best work so compelling. Even Aidan Moffat's story-lyrics, usually deranged enough to justify the diatonic music, rarely rise above the level of straightforward, obvious reflections here. Similarly problematic is Gorillaz, Damon Albarn's uninspired collaboration with Dan Nakamura. Those who have purchased the album on the strength of the somewhat overrated single "Clint Eastwood" are in for a big let-down; Del The Funkee Homosapien isn't featured on any other track on the self-titled debut. Instead, Albarn is miscast in the role of Beth Gibbons, intoning over tired trip-hop tracks that would have sounded dated three years ago. Definitely the least convincing act to ever hide behind cartoons; Josie and The Pussycats were more interesting than this. Faith In The Morning, Whistler's sophomore effort, is also a moderate disappointment; Kerry Shaw's voice is as intoxicating as always, but songwriter Ian Dench has failed to come up with enough memorable melodies to round out a single side, let alone a full album. On Whistler's savage debut, Shaw spun out vicious narratives and character studies with pointed lyrics; here, her perspective has deepened and been given a softer focus, she's less pugnacious and faux-jaded, more heartbroken and genuinely perspicacious. It's an exchange that rewards repeated listening, but I am not sure anyone will have the patience. Finally, there's a new group out of England you may have heard of, called Radiohead. They've recently released a new long-player titled Amnesiac. Sonically, it is difficult to distinguish from its immediate predecessor, which was similarly featureless in its ambient indulgences. The singer sounds like an intoxicated frog whose feelings are hurt. Their Rolling Stone cover story was called "In Order To Save Themselves, Radiohead Had To Destroy Rock And Roll." Hey, thanks a lot, guys; I appreciate it.

 

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