Hardcore for Nerds

Si Schroeder - ‘Jump Ship’

I wasn’t particularly impressed by this song - a single for the long-awaited, apparently forthcoming, yet suspiciously-named sophomore album Holding Patterns - the first time I heard it, but it’s grown on me since. It’s going up against a very high standard of earlier work, of course, and the style hasn’t changed much since Coping Mechanisms (2006). It’s still music rooted in the texture of the past, rediscovered sounds, being crushed by the violence of the now; the immediacy of the emotion finds its way from the unfolding slowness of gentle singing to the squall of unleashed, sublime instrumentation. 

It was particularly good at the launch gig (featuring amongst the attendees distorte dot tumblr dot com) in the Workman’s Club last Friday, where I think I heard him comment after the song finished with its noisy crescendo ‘that’s what it’s been like in here the past few years’. Which is kinda why this has enough potency to stand up to EMA in the quality stakes of music I’m listening to these days. There’s a weight to this that’s both rare enough to find, anywhere, and subtle enough to require time to uncover. 

It’s also worth reading this interesting interview with the man where he takes aim at gig-goers (“I find a lot of gigs to be overwhelmingly social events, rarely about the music” - definitely true, ironically enough, about his own gig, where most of the crowd talked over the quiet parts and quite possibly the loud parts as well) and most of an entire genre of music (“Pretty much all dance music and dance-influenced music is offensive to me.” “MBV took ecstasy too, they just did something more interesting with it.”) He doesn’t seem like a deliberate controversialist, he just has his convictions about his own tastes.

Codeine - ‘Wird’ from The White Birch (Sub Pop, 1994)

(w/ gtr by David Grubbs)

I am in the room, I am in the anteroom

So, your comparison for today is ‘slowcore’. Although neither this song nor ‘Anteroom’ are close to being typical examples - ‘Wird’ because it’s essentially a Slint song (albeit phrased rather differently, the same story told in a different instrumental ‘voice’), ‘Anteroom’ because it’s so full of melody, harmony, all those song-y things that are usually stripped away, or back, in a true slowcore song. Nevertheless, ‘Anteroom’ has that minimalist feel of the genre, where every guitar chord - the opening calling back to the sublimated folk of ‘California’ - both echoes in empty space and fills it up with a resonant beauty. ‘Wird’ is far starker, but its deconstructed tones nevertheless manage to convey the feel of a tune, its inner structure: which is what slowcore is all about.

“I can sense the ghost in the machine” is about finding the spiritual in the technical, the animating force in the material flesh. It’s also, variously, an illustration of the absurdity of Cartesian dualism, a popular ‘science’ book by Arthur Koestler, the title of a 1981 album by The Police, and the inspiration for the Japanese manga Ghost in the Shell. But here it carries a slippery irony, because it seems to promise hope “No one has to shriek/No one has to worry now” yet does so in a way that immediately suggests a reality that is the opposite. The personal ghost is maybe the key we wish we had to the world; but we can never be sure we have it, we’re never quite there.

“Who built

Who built this machine?

This mechanism

This misery”

Codeine, ‘Wird’

Codeine’s The White Birch seemed to me to be the worst possible album to listen to it in a bad mood, because its opening bars are so dull and leaden, and continue that way through most of the songs, that they just increase the feeling of numbness and separation: but now I’ve figured out that you just need to stick it out until the really heavy guitars come in, crushing everything before them in a crunchy mass of distortion - too one-directional and unvarying to be truly cathartic, but giving a momentary glimpse of that feeling of life, of pure animation; that ghost. And around that, exquisite emptiness - it turns out that the hammer blows are not just part of the machine, they’re its spirit too.

At this point in Past Life Martyred Saints, we’re already familiar with EMA’s vocal and song-writing style: I kind of feel like ‘California’ is the real first track, with ‘The Grey Ship’ has more of an extended prologue, which makes ‘Anteroom’ the introduction to the rest of the album. What that means is that the difference in style - foreshadowing ‘Coda’ and ‘Marked’ in its spacious intensity - can’t hide much, we still can predict the trajectory and the rhythm of the song as she sings it. In a certain embellished-slowcore fashion, there’s a gentle rise and fall of guitar and voice for the first third, before the drums kick in with quite a pronounced effect: again, very slowcore. Then the guitar builds up to an almost hummable crescendo, before dropping out to leave four solitary piano notes; then the voice comes back in, once, then double, and a while later, drums again: everything falls apart and then comes back together again - “If this time through we don’t get it right, I’ll come back to you in another life”.     

boatzone3:

David Grubbs, “Gethsemani Night” from An Optimist Notes the Dusk

A career highlight for a dude with a career so sterling that its hard to say, usually, which’re the hi-lites.

Duck! Si Schroeder, Coping Mechanisms

“It’s like My Bloody Valentine for young people, I guess. Or Lady Gaga for old people.” B Michael on Treats 

“I think it means this album can be used entirely for shoegaze purposes or entirely for RESPOND-NOW purposes!” a grammar

As much as I think that the ‘enthusiasm’ part of Sleigh Bells is discredited, I’m intrigued by the shoegaze comparisons. The quieter songs on the album are, naturally, less grating (even though I like loud distortion… I must like it at a higher bitrate or something) but not particularly more likeable. Although, I hasten to add, the whole thing is quite listenable - and so is most intelligent pop music, I assume. I just never want to listen to dance-pop, although I’m happy for other people to so and work it into forms of music I do like. Loveless has dance-y bits in it, being from the very early 90s, and arguably pieces of their trad Irish heritage, but it is all suffused and enveloped in the sound of one the greatest rock albums of all time. 

So I’ve said that I don’t want to be a rockist, but that I still hold onto the ideal of there being something (but what?) ‘authentic’ in music. When barthel wants to “make the case for the possibility that there is very much a there there on Treats”, I’m all for it. Maybe it’s a pop ‘there’ rather than a rock ‘there’, and certainly not a ‘punk’ there (although its seemingly vacuous nature could stand comparison with the Ramones’ debut). But “the contrast between the overwhelming sound of the music and the calmness of Alexis’ vocals” is also describing Loveless, or the dynamic of slowcore, Slint, or any post-combinations thereof. That’s why I posted the Mclusky song ‘Slay!’ before, because it rocks that quiet/loud post-hardcore dynamic just as well as anything by Sleigh Bells. Probably better, but to be fair the latter seem not to be consciously going for it - it’s a broken reference, a disconnect which leaves fans of indie and hardcore at a loose end unless they also like the dance-pop side of their sound. 

Here, I’ve posted a song by Irish ex-shoegazer/Sonic Youth-er Si Schroeder, which starts off fairly minimalist up until “if you won’t put out/you won’t get out of here” (!!!?), and then turns maximal. Live, that becomes very max;here on record it’s deliberately restrained, but still communicates that sense of being overwhelmed.

songsthataregood:

The New Year - The Door Opens
(The New Year)

Although Bedhead is no more, the Kadane brothers toil on with their new friends in The New Year.  Despite their irritatingly un-google-able name, and their impossible-to-keep-straight album names (Newness Ends, The End Is Near, and The New Year, I think), they’re doing quite well for themselves.  They even had a song on some big-time TV show (technically it was Band of Horses covering them but still).

thanks to lex dexter for turning me on to this band, this album, and that brilliant opening track (‘Folios’). I’ve picked up some of the other records via eMusic, but this one can’t be topped. It’s like slowcore emerging from a chrysalis and becoming a slightly livelier moth - you know, it’s cheerier, more upbeat even, but still full of that inescapable pathos that makes your heart go ‘ow’.

willthenight:

Low

“Transmission”

Transmission EP

1996

If I’m going to talk about how Joy Division inspired bands to explore extremes of minimalism, slow tempo, and emotional focus, the discussion has to begin with Low. Low created the template, one of the greatest and most instantly recognizable “sounds” in the post-punk era.  Yes, I would argue that Low belong to the post-punk era, musically at least, but that’s another post.  “Transmission” is one of the best demonstrations of how Low were able to use this formula not only to make songs from disparate sources their own, but also how in the best cases this type of formalist exercise can combine with outstanding performances to bring out different shades of meaning in the original. 

The band’s first two albums, I Could Live in Hope and Long Division, had been similar in sound, song structures and subject matter.  They had an idea, a great one, and they applied it rigorously and successfully.  The antecedents of this big idea are most easily found in the early albums of the Cure, Joy Division’s two albums, and to a lesser extent Galaxie 500 (at least partially through shared producer, Kramer) and the Velvet Underground (from whom all good things come).  Although it had been a part of their live set for some time, “Transmission” was released as the lead track of a stop-gap EP early in 1996.  The song had also appeared on the A Means to an End tribute compilation a few months previously (see also, Codeine). Coming just as they were about to take a great leap beyond “the template” on The Curtain Hits the Cast, it’s tempting to see the band’s adoption of this song at this particular time as serving two purposes: to pay tribute to a band that had helped them to discover their own unique sound, and to express “the template” in its purest form before moving into more experimental territory. They wanted to sound like Joy Division, but slower. And it was beautiful.

It’s beyond obvious to say explicitly, but Low’s “Transmission” is much slower than the original. The instrumentation is minimal, the propulsive bass line of the original becomes a slow pulse, joined by by Mimi Parker’s lonely ride cymbal and heavily reverbed snare, both played with brushes.  There are no obvious guitar overdubs, just Alan Sparhawk’s single guitar with all the telltale noises and tiny goofs of a one-take performance. Despite the slow tempo, the dynamic build in the song’s final third is just as thrilling and invigorating as in the original.  But clearly, this is not a rave-up, it’s a meditation.

And it’s not a particularly uplifting one at that.  Ian Curtis’s vocal on the original “Transmission” was a plea for connection—alone in a fragmented world, he reaches out for shared communal experience, imploring his audience to dance, dance, dance to a live radio broadcast.  “Touching from a distance, further all the time,” but still touching.  Alan Sparhawk’s vocal is layered in the same digital delay that Joy Division had used so well, but his tone is sneering, almost sarcastic.  Although Mimi Parker’s voice is human and beautiful, in the song’s climax the harmony between the two vocalists suggests only foreboding. There is no hope here, no distant community to reach out to, and the shared experience provided by radio broadcasts is only an illusion. The radio is just another automaton. 

The fragmented bursts of broadcasts sprinkled throughout the track further express this theme—the broadcasts are inhuman, random and communicate nothing. But those random radio transmissions have a story themselves, as they are most likely an homage to the 1967 Silver Apples track “Program,” which dealt with similar subject matter in a more oblique way. I would not make this connection so explicitly if I had not seen Low perform “Program” during an afternoon show in Minneapolis in the summer of 1999.  This was my introduction to the music of the Silver Apples, and further proof that while “the template” belongs uniquely to Low, they found great inspiration in the earlier work of others, and in cases like “Transmission” took that inspiration in new and impressive directions.

I’ve never been much into Low, preferring the more direct sounds of the likes of Slint or Codeine, but I very much dig the slowcore aesthetic. Another example is this far less polished and more straightforward cover of ‘Disorder’ by Bedhead, which still definitely translates the Joy Division song into slowcore terms.

I’m glad you mentioned the Velvet Underground in this, because I hear a lot of them in this take on Joy Division. As befits the genre, the song takes a long time to get anywhere, but the way the delivery of the vocals is slowed down, extending the notes being actually sung is very VU, as is the echoing chime of the chord changes in the final part; it’s the creation of space, part meditative, part rave-up (which occurs in some Velvet Underground tracks and which is left unspoken, but implied, on slowcore ones) which made their albums so beautiful. But beauty is just the flipside of ugliness, and my point would be that whether a Joy Division cover is spacious (like this one) or crowded out (like Xiu Xiu), it’s expressing something similar around the shared emotional beat.

boatzone3:

pgwp:

solarflares:

Mirror Repair  -  Gastr del Sol

via: homeofthevain
image: David Gilbert

always good to hear some David Grubbs.