Music Criticism

I tend to be defensive of critics, even the ones who give every Radiohead and U2 album perfect scores. This is because I generally see critics as simply being a reflection of what people what – that all free market thing, I suppose. But sometimes an album gets hyped beyond belief and another of a similar genre and a similar quality is basically ignored. The prime example of this this year is The Field’s From Here We Go Sublime. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good, very good. A subtle synthesis of various different elements into minimal house. Or something like that.

 

But there’s another album on the same label (which means more regarding the style of music in the techno world than it does for rock) that came out around the same time (actually, according to Wikipedia and Amazon, just a day later) that’s at least as good. Certainly more daring from a technical standpoint, but still just as accessible. And that album is Gui Boratto’s Chromophobia. The only reason it hasn’t gotten so much attention is simply because a group of critics happened to find From Here We Go Sublime at the same time and loved it. And maybe there wasn’t enough room for Boratto after that; it’s pretty damn rare that two pure electronica albums will get widespread American praise in the same year, let alone two that are basically in the same somewhat niche genre. Critics here don’t pay much attention to techno that isn’t connected to rock in some way, and I don’t know how The Field fell into their laps to begin with. I suppose I should be glad about that, but it gets kind of frustrating to see something you love ignored. In any case I doubt the attention will bring more listeners to microhouse despite the fact that The Field is, again, just one of many in the Kompakt lineup.

 

So if you liked From Here We Go Sublime, I highly recommend Chromophobia. It’s a start, at least.

The Soundtrack of Juno

For a variety of reasons, I was pretty disappointed by this movie. But the first thing I want to do is talk about its soundtrack, which was seriously bad enough for me to lower my personal rating by at least half a grade.

 

It is absolutely baffling to me that Kimya Dawson is still polluting the musical landscape. She sucks, and the Moldy Peaches sucked, and hell, Adam Green sucks too. They personify the kind of hipster anti-music that occasionally seeps forth from the bowels of New York. Thankfully, the soundtrack is broken up by a few other bands, including the notoriously soporific Belle & Sebastian, who sound like Pantera in comparison. The suffocatingly cutesy music in this movie combined with the suffocatingly cutesy dialogue was just too much to take. Please, for the love of God, do not take this as emblematic of what “twee” music is. Twee does not mean utterly devoid of any life or soul and, while I’m no expert, I don’t think the point of twee is to try to be as cutesy and amusical as possible. That is what the Shaggs were for. The music, like the movie, tries way too hard to be hip – at least Wes Anderson, an obvious influence on Juno, mixes things up a little. It may have been hip (and still shitty) in 1997, but it sure as hell isn’t hip today. Whatever that means.

 

Some other music-related things from the movie – I don’t think anyone in the history of western civilization would ever introduce someone to Sonic Youth with “Superstar,” unless that person was already some sort of die-hard Carpenters fan. No, it seems like this was only used so the White Stripes could be referenced.

 

Speaking of that, does Ms. Cody know of any other bands from that era besides the Melvins and Sonic Youth? Because they are the only ones Bateman specifically mentions, over, and over, and over again. And I think those were the only visible posters in his room, though I may be mistaken.

 

By the way, Juno is 16 years old and yet is intimately familiar with bands such as the Stooges and Patti Smith. Fair enough, I was a similar situation. But…how is it that she seems to have never even heard of Sonic Youth? Maybe I’m not being fair – I was old enough to at least have heard of them somewhere when they signed with Geffen.

 

The Stooges, and Patti Smith, and Mott the Hoople…so let’s form a band that sounds like the Moldy fucking Peaches? Jesus Christ, I hate them.

 

Maybe I’ll say more on why I thought the movie was no better than a C+ or 3 stars or whatever scale you want to use later.

The Hated

It’s interesting to me that the obscure Annapolis 80s punk band is considered one of the earliest emo bands. Because, frankly, their music has hardly anything to do with emo at all. And yes, I realize that emo isn’t Dashboard Confessional. And I love the Hated; it’s positively criminal that they have yet to get a CD reissue. But more than anything else they sound like a slight evolution of Husker Du circa Zen Arcade. Husker Du was an influence on emo themselves, but they weren’t emo. And the bands that were indisputably emo in the beginning (Rites of Spring, Moss Icon) sound nothing at all like the Hated. The singing of the Hated sounds tame by comparison, and the songwriting and instrumentation is far more complex (at least compared to the contemporaneous MI stuff). This difference is more obvious in retrospect when you look at what Littleton’s done since then – that is, Ida. Compare that to the post-hardcore explorations that most of the other early emo bands developed into, if they stayed in music at all. Ida is a natural evolution of what Littleton was doing then, and Fugazi of course is a natural evolution of Rites of Spring and Embrace. Husker Du inspired hardcore punk bands to do what they wouldn’t have dared before, but a direct line of influence from Zen Arcade inevitably leads away from hardcore. Mould and Hart were never really interested in crafting experimental soundscapes – they just wanted to write some damn good songs. The fact that they, like the Hated, ended up doing this from a hardcore starting point probably has more to do with time and place than anything else. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Ian MacKaye ever doing something different than what he ended up doing.

On the other hand, maybe I’m an idiot and the only reason Husker Du ended up taking such a different tack was because they were so far-flung from D.C. The connection of Husker Du to emocore is interesting to me and seems to be seldom spoke of (I’d say that’s because Husker Du was so monumentally incredible that serious fans of the band are embarrassed to admit any connection to early emo, which really isn’t that bad so long as you can get into a certain mindset), and I feel like the Hated are the “missing link,” so to speak. On the other hand, it’s after 2 AM, and I was just being born in 1985, hundreds of miles away from where this was all taking place. Maybe I should ask Bob Mould what he thinks.