Tuesday, February 13, 2018

actually, i have absolutely no idea at all what a "cara delavigne" is.

sorry.

but, it would be nice if, whatever it is, it would return what was once one of the most promising electronic musicians out there back to the home planet.

in the end, nobody is saved. i know better.

but, i'm not interested in the corporate rock mythology. annie clark wasn't some throwaway junkie like kurt cobain or amy winehouse; she had a lot of talent, and it's sad to see it be pulverized under whatever combination of addiction and greed that it got pulverized under...

and, then, bjork.

my expectations with bjork have been dramatically lowered over the last fifteen years, to the point that i'll consider this a successful release if i deduce it's worth listening to a second time.

it's starting off relatively well. let's see where it goes.

i'm at track two, and this currently sounds like every other time that bjork has tried to be serious since vespertine, which wouldn't be such a tragedy if it were more dynamic. it's less that it's the same thing over and over again, and more that it's the same meandering aimlessness, yet again.

i caught the mt zion sample. did you?

i'm going to let this play, because it's bjork and i can still enjoy what is really brutal stagnation from her on a kind of basic level. and, i might listen to it a second time, too. but, she really needs somebody to challenge her, to take her out of these patterns she's built up around herself, to smash whatever mental chains are keeping her running on the spot and prevent her from going over what is really the same song over and over and over.

thoughts on the new st. vincent record.

i skipped st vincent, who i've still yet to see play an actual set, a few months ago after giving the record a very brief listen and finding essentially nothing of value in it at all. i'm coming back to it now as a last chance, and it's just really not remotely in my sphere of interest, at this point.

hopefully, she finds a way to put the pills away and get her brain back. but, that's not how this usually works.

that is my takeaway from this record: annie clark's talent has apparently evaporated due to drug use.

first impressions of the new son lux record

i've been waiting for this one for what seems like forever, and it's actually been a while since i found myself doing anything like that; i've become used to disappointment after a few records, and, in the process, just stumbling upon things, sometimes months after the fact.

the lead singles had me worried, but not too worried, because i went through this with the last record, too - the singles seemed flat when separated out from the record. but, i don't 'get' singles, anyways, unless they're epics. they're just too short. i have a very hard time focusing on pieces of music for less than five minutes at a time...it's done before it starts...and, as an ad, which is all a single can ever really be, artistically, the process of releasing singles seems incapable of hooking me, and may have even turned me off of records i would have otherwise liked.

so, fuck singles. i should really just not bother, and ritually wait for the records. easier said than done, right?

but, any perceived lack of depth that the singles projected when separated from the record evaporates upon a few listens. and i need to stress the necessity to listen. at least five times. son lux has always been a little difficult, that's half of why i'm attracted to it, but it's also always been very rewarding, as pop, once you disentangle it, which is the other half of the reason i'm attracted to it. this record is, at times, just kind of opaque, on immediate first impression. the sound is saturated over the spectrum, and it needs to be disentangled, but it's the syncopation that you need to really get used to before you can mentally decode the songs into something coherent.

if you're not going to give this some time, you're going to get bored quickly enough, and i'll tell you that this will unfortunately happen to quite a few people. but, if you spend the time with it, you're going to uncover a record that is simultaneously a little bit of a throwback to the outsider music of the first record and a kind of a step towards glossier pop, at the same time. the record also reuses a number of themes on the records in between. this makes the project seem somewhat like a summary of ryan lott's career, and i might question his motives in doing that.

if the band pivots after this record into less abstract material, this will likely end up as the normal way into son lux' comparably deeper and more difficult back catalogue. backwards.

as a contained record, this pull between what i'm projecting as a poppier future for the band and the more artistic past that already exists leaves something that is almost existential in scope. while this is where the music i listen to normally lives, i actually kind of liked the sheltered and somewhat neurotic vocals that i'm used to from this band and hope that, at the least, we get to keep this moving forward. but, you can hear that he's interpreted the present moment as some kind of pivot, some kind of paradigmatic shift, some kind of epiphany: weren't we beautiful once?

sure, ryan. back when america was great, right? but, make sure you're careful getting off the cross, because there's another martyr in line behind you.

i don't expect this band to go full boring. if anything, he's projecting a strong palette of pop influences; on this record, the very obvious nods are to freddie mercury and david bowie, and if these are the pop icons he's throwing out in front of him, what's coming is likely to be both ambitious and tasteful.

but, i wouldn't expect another record like this.

http://music.sonluxmusic.com/album/brighter-wounds