B is for Bardo Pond
Lapsed(Matador, 1997)
Lapsed is another album from a band I love that nonetheless took some time for me to appreciate. I originally bought it on a recommendation from
Pitchfork (!) (do I lose?), and just as I've never been quick about shoegaze, the big walls of guitars on
Lapsed didn't affect me straight away. But then I happened onto the one substance that makes all music sound awesome, dude: VOLUME, LOTS OF VOLUME. Because when the thick fuzz is
loud, it's at its most palpable.
With
Lapsed, Bardo reached their cacophonous noise-peak:
Set and Setting became a lot more musically controlled,
Dilate was, uh, kind of boring, and
On The Ellipse with its quiet-then-loud the sonic opposite of
Lapsed, which is loud-then-LOUD -- though amazingly, the album doesn't get monotonous, mostly because the monstrous slabs of guitar textures keep changing shapes, even if slowly of the course of a 14-minute track.
And like an inexpressive hippie that this album turns me into, I have a hard time describing
Lapsed without resorting to far-out metaphor.
1. "Tommy Gun Angel" -- Like time and space being ripped apart, maaaan. Another apt metaphor that I've heard is that "Tommy Gun Angel" sounds like a rocketship starting up. Their ultimate shoegaze song, and as I alluded to earlier, shoegaze isn't my favorite genre. I think what eventually put "Tommy Gun Angel" over for me was
this performance, and now whenever I listen to the song, my senses see in crazy inverted color and time indeed stands still as I head out for the Great Beyond.
2. "Green Man" -- The bass that dangles just kills me -- among my favorite bass workouts that Bardo's ever recorded. It's like "Flux, Jr." but better because with 3 fewer minutes, "Green Man" is more intense than "Flux."
3. "Flux" -- Ideally, you need to listen to "Flux" on 11 -- with headphones, but that's living much more dangerously than I care to. Among the best of vintage old school Bardo: loud (no duh) and slow. The wall of guitar is so thick and sheer, and churns so deliberately -- "Flux" is like sitting in the crevace of a glaciar, listening to the ice groan and echo over itself until the noise fills the entire space over the course of eons.
4. "Aldrin" -- The mellowest track on
Lapsed ("Green Man" minus the menace) until, oh, the 11-minute mark, when the buzzsaw guitars cut through and drop a sonic bomb of distortion and the drums bam it up a notch.
5. "Pick My Brain" -- For the longest time, the twangy guitars bugged me, but then, guess what, I turned up the volume. Isobel Sollengberger's vocals get an unexpected workout, singing with less restraint than her usual grooved out post-Beats poetry.
Worst Track: "Straw Dog" -- Dog is right! I kid -- the song isn't bad by any means, but the riff isn't a great one to begin with, and "Straw Dog" keeps using it over and over again.
TV Rating: Alias - "The Hourglass"
A is for Autechre
Chiastic Slide(Warp Records, 1997)
I anticipated that the first entry to
A is for Music would be easy to choose. (That is, I cipated that the choice would be hard.) But when it came time to actually decide on the entry, I was paralyzed with indecision. An
album that I bought three times? Or something by
pseudo-jailbait infectiously Europop songstress?
But after deep soul-searching and a little bit of
prodding (which if you don't know already is far more canonical than I'm going to be), I'll just go ahead and say that
Chiastic Slide is my lead-off entry.
Doesn't matter if most listeners
seriously underrate Chiastic, the Autechre cognoscenti (of which I am obviously a part) call it one of Booth and Brown's best albums to date.
Chiastic is their most successful (and perhaps only?) attempt at combining their early ambient techno organicness with the generative thuggery for which they're currently notorious. They may have been more melodic before (
Incunabula,
Amber), and more confrontationally
intelligent afterwards (everything they've released after 2001), but
Chiastic bridges both phases.
And if you're still not convinced,
Chiastic Slide has added indie cred by being domestically unavailable in the States (except as an import) until 2001, four years after its release in the UK.
1. "Cichli" - Ah, that twinkling melody! "Cichli" has Autechre's usual flat, compressed beats that are not so much percussion as they
percuss, but the lullaby-like melody is so sweet that it softens the hard edges of the song into a warm bed, lushly monochromatic. And if post-
Confield Autechre is the stark black-and-white of German expressionism, then "Cichli" (and the rest of
Chiastic) has the luxuriant hues of Dreiser's
The Passion of Joan of Arc. (Take
that Pitchfork!)
2. "Recury" - True story: I was at a show where Mira "Mrs. Autechre" Calix was DJing, and being married to Sean Booth means she had to dominate her set with: 1. the most barely there ambient; and 2. harsh industrial noise like Richard Devine and Venetian Snares. In other words, INTELLIGENT DANCE MUSIC THAT YOU CAN'T DANCE TO BECAUSE IT'S, YOU KNOW, "INTELLIGENT," I.E. BORING. But then she dropped "Recury" on the turntable -- a track that had been buried under an album that I was still pretty far from getting into -- and I realized that the beats stomped hard like gigantic chrome pistons and the (yes) melody was another killer, and from there as I shook my skinny behind (I'll admit as well as a
So You Think You Can Dance reject), I was on my way to
Chiastic fandom.
3. "Cipater" - Crunchy, fat beats that can't be anticipated!
4. "Rettic AC" - I surprised myself by liking "Rettic AC." After all, it's 2 minutes of fuzzy static and weird synth patches yawning in the backgroud, but like most of Autechre's more ambient tracks, it bores into your head until it grows into something as silently engrossing as the
Chiastic coverart.
5. "Nuane" - Like "Cipater," but on steroids and Robot Growth Hormone. I like to imagine that it's the soundtrack to a cyborg horror film.
Worst Song: "Pule"And here I confess that I don't like Autechre's ambient tracks. "Rettic AC" is an exception because it's 2 minutes, but every other ambient track is more than 6 minutes and generally rates at least a 7 on my Boring Index, and "Pule" is as non-descript as "Overand," "Yulquen," and "Uviol."
TV Rating: Twin Peaks - "The Last Evening"
An Introduction
Used to be, when someone asked me what music I liked, I had trouble remembering them, so I created a mnemonic to help with my recall: I memorized my favorite bands according to the alphabet. I've accumulated enough music now that I cover most of the 26 letters, and for my idea of fun, I enjoy running through my mental list just to see how many letters I can make, which of course loses its luster after the first 20 times I do it.
So, to extend the life of my alphabetical list of favorite bands, I'm starting this A is for Music, partly to document my list in a tangible form (as tangible as the Interweb can be), and partly to practice writing music reviews, partly to reasses my collectiona nd also to expand it, since I'm very much lacking in the following letters: I, J, N, Q, R, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. (And typing that all out, it looks like I'm way too short to realistically accomplish this project, but dammit, let me wave my ego around.) So if you have a suggestion, don't hesitate at all to
recommend me Zappa or the Q and Not U or Neu! or some band that I've not gotten around to hearing.
I'll be focusing on my favorite album(s) by these alphabetical artists on this blog as sort of my own definitive Top 26 albums list.
My method: each week/letter, I'll post one album that I love with a brief description, and copping yet another idea gotten from
Soi Disantra, I'll rank my five favorite tracks on it and my least favorite tracks, each with its own individual write-up. Eligible albums have to be studio recorded -- no live albums, no best-of compilations. After 26 weeks (and hopefully 26 entries), I'll go through the alphabet again, though I'll allow myself to skip over those old trouble letters. I'm not sure if I'll allow multiple albums by a single artist yet -- we'll see, I suppose.
I briefly considered limiting albums that have been released no earlier than 2001 for that 5-year Hall of Fame waiting criterion to make sure that I actually like the album a lot -- but for me, this sort of waiting period is arbitrary, especially since I search out music in a very belated and slow fashion. For instance, I've listened to PJ Harvey way longer than I have anything by Can -- so why should
Uh Huh Her be disqualified even though I've more familiar with it than
Tago Mago? (Note:
Uh Huh Her actually sucks.) Anyway, I also believe that such lists -- as much as I love them -- are hardly eternal and unchanging creatures, so instituting any 5-year rule in the name of objectivity won't pass muster with me.
TV Rating: America's Next Top Model (Cycle 3) - "The Girl With the Secret
