JAKE CLELAND

Being “Shapiro.”

From “Yeah Yeah Yeahs Get the Last Laugh at Their 10th Anniversary Show”:

“when you are not yet successful and you play at shitholes and make no money, what you want to do is make money and have millions of people love you because it is not fun to toil in obscurity forever, and then once millions of people love you and you make a lot of money it must bother you that no matter how great your band still is and how hard you try every night, the coolest kids are not the ones who are coming out anymore, because they have found new cool bands or and are maybe rolling their eyes at you”

David Shapiro is in an unfortunate circumstance due to his popularity: he’s mired by the expectation that the quality of each thing he writes is equivalent not only to the meaningfulness of the last thing he wrote, but also to the amount of exposure it gets. As he only publishes on his very popular blog or the well-respected and even more popular The Awl, the exposure, and thus expected quality, is immense. It’s also compacted by the infrequency of his writing, so I’m reminded of two things: Craig Finn, who once said “It doesn’t have to be your masterpiece if you don’t wait six years between records,” and the movie Chasing Amy, in which Jay comments on the first time Silent Bob says something in the movie, “He thinks just ‘cos he doesn’t say anything, it’ll have this huge impact when he does open his fuckin’ mouth.” The solution that both suggest is that there’s an acceptable compromise between quantity and quality, not necessarily that higher quantity means decreased quality, but at least that the quantity makes a decreased quality more acceptable, so that by being a prominent writer and only publishing once every few months you’re establishing higher standards. Whether that’s unfair or not is a question that speaks to our whole attitude towards status and popularity, but it’s unquestionably not a helpful factor in writing in as captivating a way as he used to; success almost always weighs on the mind and I doubt it’s ever contributed to better writing. Shapiro at least seems to agree:

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Someone fill me in on School of Seven Bells.

In three sentences, what’s the critical backstory on these kids?

"Jesus Fever," Kurt Vile. 132 plays. One weekend during July counts for about 30 of these, I think. If I were to quantify my love for this song, it "peaked" then.

Our Abusive Relationship.

“Oh man, I feel bad for not getting into Gang Gang Dance earlier.”

“Meh.”

“Oh shut up, Skrillex boy. Go write something for Thought Catalog about how pretty LMFAO sounds.”

An image of Skrillex about to let go of a fish with the caption “Check out this sick bass drop.”

52 Albums: #46

Cornershop are one of the more interesting bands I’ve heard to have come out of the British indie rock scene in the 90s. Drawing on the heritage of frontman Tjinder Singh and his bass-playing brother and named after the stereotype of British Asians owning corner shops, When I Was Born For The 7th Time mixes Indian themes with hip-hop over a decade before Das Racist floored the underground with Shut Up, Dude.

They’re probably best known for “Brimful of Asha” via the Fatboy Slim remix, a catchy ode to the Indian movie industry tradition of playback singers like Asha Bhosle (“She’s the one that keeps the dream alive”), but their hip-hop influences come through especially strong on instrumental tracks like “State Troopers” and “Coming Up”. Otherwise they aren’t as aggressive as DR, singing about opening yourself up to enjoying life because “good shit’s all around… it’s the truth” (“Good Shit”)  and telling wistful tales about a King and Queen’s childhood in Punjabi (“We’re In Yr Corner”).

That relative placidity makes it clear why a writer might suspect they use their Indian-ness as nothing more than a gimmick to differentiate themselves from any other 90s rock band, but arguably that aspect is an inextricable part of Tjinder Singh’s identity, and not that he totally avoids overt political messages (“We don’t care about no government warning / About that promotion of the simple life and the damns they’re building”), but he doesn’t really have an obligation to use that in an extrovertly political manner. However, as tumblr’s favourite rappers have shown, if you want to distinguish yourself as a musician, confronting prejudice and confused racial identity head on is not a bad way to do so.

52 Albums: #45

The record, I was surprised to discover, is not actually dub music, the reggae-flavoured spin-off genre that helped bands like The Clash set themselves apart from the rest of the punk trash, and although it seems very reductive to think of dub simply in relation to how it effected punk music, that’s how I’ve always related to it. A fun anecdote about dub: earlier this year I hosted a panel on music journalism and one of the panelists was the renowned DJ Systa BB, who prefaced her own anecdote about dub by telling me “And I mean dub, not dubstep!” That might’ve felt condescending if I hadn’t, at one point, genuinely thought dub and dubstep were a lot more similar than they are.

Lead singer and only constant band member David Thomas’s vocal flailing reminds me of Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, or maybe Bryan Ferry. This, combined with the band’s fearlessness to reach into the most bizarre, unexplored musical territory, from the house-of-horrors madness of “Thriller!” to the ominous, electronic churning of “Blow Daddy-o”, makes the band seem like servants tortured into utter insanity and twisted to unnatural misdeeds by the brilliant master Dr. Thomas, like Tesla if written by Terry Pratchett. There are some more straight-forward tracks (the surf-rock-y “Ubu Dance Party”, the bass and Doors-like synth of “On The Surface”) but for whatever poppy qualities they have, they’re still warped beyond belief. David Thomas once said that the band had a “real recipe for failure,” and judging by their decades of relative obscurity, at least in terms of mainstream appeal he’s apparently right. I’m sure Thomas knows this, but some of the greatest innovation throughout history came from the by-product of ostensible failure. 

52 Albums: #44

The thing about this town is that it has all the reagents to go from so cozy it feels like you own the place to some Silent Hill, deserted highway pitstop where the petrol station, the only thing open past 9pm, becomes the refuge of humanity’s last stand. You don’t wanna get caught listening to Chelsea Girl when the latter sets in. At a gathering on Christmas Day, one of my friends talked about how 30s music is inextricably linked with the horrific apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout, the dichotomy of the music’s quaint innocence with the eradication of society making it sound even more terrifying. It’s the same principle that makes zombie children so scary, as if kids weren’t bad enough. It’s the tiny hands.

On a warm, Summer’s day - which I don’t recall Christmas ever being, it always ends in storms and this year it brought golf ball-sized, car-wrecking hail - Chelsea Girl probably sounds like a wistful dream. The orchestral quality of the violins that back the melody of Nico’s voice, certainly more tuneful than the sort of thing I usually listen to, probably sound quite pleasant under better circumstances, and please, when I say “pleasant,” I don’t mean to imply that it’s light and insubstantial or merely ‘not unpleasant,’ I mean it’s sensorially delightful. Not so for me, I’m afraid. As a car slows down in front of me while walking home and Nico sings “Fare thee well” on “Little Sister”, it sounds so portentous to an impending kidnapping that my adrenaline starts pumping and I prepare to run for my life. This is what happens when you drink too much.

52 Albums: #43

A lot of my favourite bands this year are part of the lineage shared by Guided by Voices, the lineage of scuzzy, vibrant, somewhat juvenile garage rock. Maybe the most renowned of the bunch, Royal Headache, allegedly played their first US tour to a series of empty bars and band-rooms earlier in the year, but that’s hopefully just Australian self-deprecation.

28 songs long with nothing over 2:56, just 14 seconds over Joshua Allen’s proposed perfect song-length, Alien Lanes is a sprint medley relay of poorly-recorded but very melodic rock ranging from sharp punk ditties (“Gold Hick”) to twinkling acoustic tunes (“As We Go Up, We Go Down”). Released in 1995 with Matador Records, their first since signing to the indie vanguard, the advance was allegedly close to a hundred thousand dollars. Haha, the 90s.

From track to track, the band proves surprisingly versatile. On “Game of Pricks” the guitars carry a Ramones-esque pulse but two songs later on “A Good Flying Bird” they go into a pop-punk twang, Robert Pollard’s voice going from a contemplative plod with “You can never be strong / You can only be free” on the former to an anthemic, fist-pumping “Yahhh! Yahhh! Yahhh! Yahhh!” on the latter, followed by “Cigarette Tricks” with a burbling synth making sounds like a 16-bit video game. Like runners handing off a baton, GBV change up once a minute before sprinting off once again, although Pollard’s grim pessimism suggests that if they’re running anywhere, it’s straight into the ground. This all culminates in the cynical, Oriental riff-borrowing “Always Crush Me” and the muffled “Alright”, describing the future like the Ice Age, as a time “without songs, without hope, without meaning, and therefore always having the same effect without knowing why.” For such a bleak, defeatist album, it seems like a suitably daunting note to go out on.