NO GENRE

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REM’s much-maligned exercise in glam rock, Monster, is the logical conclusion of the universally adored Lifes Rich Pageant, which has recently been reissued on its twenty-fifth birthday by IRS Records.  This record would usher in REM’s artistically and commercially successful middle period, and it would put the band on the road toward the record that seemed to break the back of their fan base.  Drawing a line between, say, “Superman” and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” is not really that difficult; what’s harder to do, of course, is explain how the band moved from the majestic “Fall On Me” to the horrid “Star 69.”  But hear me out:  Lifes Rich Pageant opened up REM’s core sound enough that it showed them that they could expand and shrink their aesthetic at will to fit the needs of any song or any album or any audience.  But by redefining the borders of their sound, REM were allowed to stray into Monster immediately after recording the most breathtaking album of their storied career, Automatic for the People.  So, Lifes Rich Pageant is a transitional album that allowed REM to become everything that they became in the nine years from Document to New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

From the sly visual pun of the cover art (Buffalo Bill!  Get it?) to the record’s overtly ecological concerns, Lifes Rich Pageant was perhaps REM’s most engaging album to date.  Not to say, of course, that early masterpieces like Murmur and Reckoning are not engaging, it’s just that Lifes Rich Pageant opened REM enough that listening felt more like a discourse than a riddle.  The clarity of Stipe’s vocals and lyrics were proving that the content of a song could be just as clear as the ringing instrumentation.  From the peppy “I Believe” to the stately “Swan Swan H,” the wider variety in tempo and tone throughout the album gave it a larger dynamic range.  While transitional albums usually exhibit a band’s growing pains, Lifes Rich Pageant simply demonstrates that REM could do practically anything they wanted to at this point in their career.  They were no longer the lean, hungry band of Murmur and Reckoning; they were growing ever more confident of their talents and ever more plugged in with their diversifying audience.  REM could start to afford to be everything to everyone.

This could certainly explain the wide variety in songwriting across Lifes Rich Pageant.  On one of the spectrum is the pounding anthem “These Days” that recalls the nervous energy of Murmur, while funereal “Swan Swan H” is a richly detailed symbolic history that sits squarely at the other end of the continuum.  In between these two poles, REM crafted an album full of a lot of instant classics:  ”Fall on Me,” “Cuyahoga,” “Begin the Begin,” “I Believe.”  Lifes Rich Pageant really has something for everyone.  REM’s softer side is represented by the beguiling “Swan Swan H” and the stirring “The Flowers of Guatemala,” and the punkish flare of “These Days” and “Hyena” could satisfy devoted fans of their earliest work.  And then there are the mid-tempo tracks that seem to refine the classic REM single: “Cuyahoga” and “Fall On Me.”  These kinds of tracks would eventually become templates for nearly every single that REM issued with a new album.  The ground in the short running time of the record is certainly impressive: only one song (“Cuyahoga”) runs beyond the four minute mark.  But what’s ultimately more impressive is that the album still feels exciting and urgent twenty-five years on.

In a career seemingly filled with important moments, Lifes Rich Pageant truly does stand as a monumental transition point for REM.  As soon as the perfect “Fall On Me” hit the airwaves, REM were firmly on a track toward enormous popularity, and this record defined the sound that they would ultimately bring to the masses in the late 80s and early 90s.  And before their series of artistic stumbles in the last decade, the expansive sound of Lifes Rich Pageant served as a template record that allowed REM to appeal to an ever-widening audience and pushed the band to refine (and re-define) their singular aesthetic.

Rating: 8.5 / 10

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“I burned out my eyes/I cut off my tongue,” goes the opening lines of “Black Tongue,” the lead teaser from Mastodon’s forthcoming The Hunter.  Serious stuff from a serious band.  How is it, then, that no one seems to accuse Mastodon of taking themselves too seriously?  Despite the occasionally overwrought and opaque narrative designs of their albums, the seminal metal outfit never seem to forget that their primary responsibility is rock the gray matter between your ears.  I mean, you just get the sense that “Black Tongue” is probably a shit load of fun to play before a reverently thrashing group of sweaty metalheads.  While the song is probably one scene in another operatically complex metal myth, “Black Tongue” sounds like a stone cold slab of glistening evil.

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Declaring that an artist has been influenced by Prince is sort of like claiming that he or she was raised on breakfast cereal.  His Royal Purpleness is so fundamental to our culture’s sound that it’s not in any way weird for Andre 3000 and The-Dream and How to Dress Well and LCD Soundsystem and Nine Inch Nails and Red Hot Chili Peppers and My Morning Jacket to all claim some piece of Prince.  And finding purple acolytes popping up in the darkest corners in the internet 25 years after his best work seems somehow inevitable.  Trying to update even portions of Prince’s massive output requires a veritable army of disciples, and the latest warrior waving Prince’s banner is Autre Ne Veut.  Following on the heels of last year’s underrated self-titled debut, Autre Ne Veut’s latest EP (with that hilariously graphic cover art above) features “Sweetheart,” a heart-on-sleeve tear-jerker of earnestly mechanized soul.  ”Sweetheart, I know we’re breaking up,” pleas our brave narrator as the music swells around him, “Sweetheart, I don’t think we’ll make it out.”  The song gushes and preens, feeling every ache and pain of its heartache, recalling the way that Prince could make romantic detonation sound enviously alive.

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Covering a song, of course, is as much an act of homage as it is a statement of influence.  A rising band’s choice of covers during their ascent can be a clear view into how, exactly, the band views itself.  Case in point: Real Estate’s sunset colored cover of The Strokes’ “Barely Legal” reveals more about the NJ slackers than it does the song by the NYC hipsters. The thought had never occurred to me before, but Real Estate might actually just be The Strokes played at half speed.   Even lead Real Estate agent Martin Coutenay has copped to The Stroke’s influence:

[We] were pretty much obsessed with [The Strokes] when we were 15. We formed a Strokes cover band [...]. When Alex got his first electric guitar, he opted for the white Stratocaster like Albert Hammond Jr. He even had the red lightning bolt strap. The approach to doing this cover was to not make it sound like the original, pretty simple. However, these songs are all arranged too well already that it’s pretty hard to come up with something new. We did a half-time drum beat thing, and then the rest of it just kind of fell into place.

Think about it a while and you realize that they represent two poles on the cool spectrum:  The Strokes’ postured downtown cool is the diametric opposite of Real Estate’s nonchalant suburban normalcy.  But between The Strokes and Yo La Tengo, Real Estate’s artistic pedigree goes a long way toward explaining why this modest and unassuming band from suburban New Jersey can seem to do no wrong.

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Immersing “Separator” in a warm bubble bath of electronics, Keran Hebden manages to make The King of Limbs‘ final bow as comforting and welcoming as Radiohead are likely to ever sound.  Finding the heart in Yorke’s voice isn’t hard, of course, but re-contextualizing it an environment in which its warm and timbre are matched and not contrasted is a very difficult task.  Nearly everything that Yorke and company have done since OK Computer has served to defamiliarize us with the angelic beauty of his voice by crafting alien and barren landscapes in which it is to wander.  But Four Tet’s excellent remix of “Separator” re-contextualizes Yorke’s endearingly smeary voice with colorful washes of undifferentiated sound.  And when Hebden leaves the aching verse-chorus-verse of the original to strike out on his own with a shaggier beat and a more insistent bassline, it is to craft the most singular moment of this remix exercise.

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Even after 5 years, Spank Rock’s majestically sleazy YoYoYoYoYo was the kind of literate non-stop erotic party album that hip hop should aim to produce more often.  But after the chilly reception to Bangers and Cash a year later, Spank Rock seemed to disappear.  Now, seemingly out of nowhere, Naeem Juwan and XXXChange (Alex Epton) show up in June with a sequin Orioles cap and a fresh beat made of Can’s eternally awesome “Vitamin C” to present you with a strange new single called “Energy.”  As the lead single from the forthcoming Everything is Boring and Everyone is a Fucking Liar, “Energy” is an anxious personal rallying cry: “I need new energy.”  This certainly represents some kind of new energy.  There’s none of the virtuosic rhyme slinging of “IMC” or the energetic pop funk of “Sweet Talk.” Who the hell knows what “Energy” means for Everything is Boring, but it seems obvious that it signals something radically new from a pair who seemed to trade exclusively in the radically new.

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If we’re to take anything from Joy Orbison’s (official?) name change, it should be that his original moniker seems reserved for intricate R&B flecked stunners like “So Derobe” and “Hyph Mngo,” while his abbreviated sobriquet Joy O seems to announce a kind of baseline hedonism.  ”I’m the information/Cocaine powder,” a down-tuned voice intones throughout Joy O’s “Sicko Cell,” a 12-inch single follow-up to his four-on-the-floor cowbell joyride “Wade In.”  While “Wade In” actually sounded coked up with its inexorable disco blitzkrieg, “Sicko Cell” is considerably more subtle, though it’s just as likely to keep as many coke-amped asses moving.   For much of the song, Joy O saddles a clinking claves beat with a hulking kick drum and a crisp snare.  But when Joy O starts layering the carefully curated details (the repetitive vocal sample, the driving bassline, the skittering cymbals), it’s clear that he intends to create an aural headrush that replicates your march down a line of blow.

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Zomby’s Where Were You in ’92? answered its own rhetorical question with an incendiary retro-futuristic nod to UK rave culture of the early ’90s.  Released roughly when the dubstep long player was starting to gain credence, Zomby revived UK hardcore and combined it with dubstep’s penchant for punishingly deep sub-bass to make a thrilling album.  But Zomby’s latest full length, Dedication, is as wildly eclectic as Where Were You was singularly focused.  Instead of piecing together a revivalist pastiche of classic UK hardcore, Zomby creates an earnest electronic lyricism that stands with the best work of bass music producers.

In a frank and heart-rending interview with Self-Titled, the producer makes it clear that the record is, in a unique way, meant as a dedication to his late father.  And with song titles like “Riding with Death” and “Haunted” and “Things Fall Apart,” it’s obvious that Dedication comes from a darkly personal place of uncertain mortality.  The album bears the weight of this emotional baggage: it sounds alternately dour and bewildered, melancholy and frightened.  The album opens with “Witch Hunt,” a particularly anxious exercise in high contrast that tries to balance a nerve-wracking cymbal pattern (easily cruising at 250 bpm) and a slow organ riff that blooms like smoke.  At some point, Zomby cocks his piece and guns down the whole composition in a deathly finale.  From there, Dedication rides every peak and valley that “Witch Hunt” has so skillfully defines: embryonic dance-floor fooder like “Alothea” and “Vortex” keep things relatively light, while earnest heartbreakers like “Natalia’s Song” and “A Devil Lay Here” provide an emotionally desolate background to the proceedings.

If there are any faults with Dedication, it is perhaps that Zomby has too many fleeting stylistic tricks that he wants to follow.  The album can come across as unfocused and scatter-shot, and it’s especially clear when he abruptly ends a song because, seemingly, he can’t figure out a way to end it properly.  And this frustrating because some of the beats he cooks up show real promise: both “Lucifer” and “Salamander” are interesting teases that never really deliver the goods.  But this is more of an inconvenience than anything else.  I would much rather listen to a producer who can’t decide between a multitude of great ideas than one who is convinced of the genius of a handful of studio tricks.  The only real misstep on the record is “Things Fall Apart,” a collaboration with Panda Bear.  While Noah Lennox has crafted an aesthetic that fits its idiosyncratic voice, his lazy surf-boy drawl has no place among the precise instrumentation of producers like Zomby and Pantha du Prince.

At its best, as it is on “Natalia’s Song” and “Alothea,” Dedication showcases everything that makes Zomby such a uniquely vital producer; in fact, the album argues for a sort of Hyperdub triumvirate of Zomby, Burial, and Kode9.  But unlike the ever reliable Bevan or Goodman, Zomby perhaps chases so many ideas that a definitive aesthetic eludes even the most attentive critic.  The only truly dominate influence might be Southern hip hop with its tumbling snares and ringing synth lines.  Dedication, then, can be an occasionally frustrating record that seems equally stingy and generous.  Even at his most parsimonious, though, Zomby can craft a finely detailed beat that draws on decades of influences while sounding abjectly modern.

Rating:  7 / 10

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With cover art that colorfully sticky, Mike Simonetti’s “The Third of the Storms,” which features vocals from Sam Sparro,” is an undeniably sentimental epic that recalls NDF’s masterful “Since We Last Met.”  Both tracks are long, slow builds toward a crescendo that never quite arrives, though “The Third of the Storms” does realign all of its elements after scattering them to the winds.  What makes both of these songs so exciting, then, is that they never reach a critical moment of emotional synthesis because charting the complex emotional register of the song is the focus for each of them.  Like with “Since We Last Met,” “The Third of the Storms” sounds like a melancholic unburdening, a lightening of expectations.  The ambiguous refrain (“When the stars align, we’ll be ready when the time is right”) sounds like both a promise and a farewell.

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TEMPORARY PLEASURE — [ˈtem-pə-ˌrer-ēˈple-zhər]

1) NOUN:  the affinity for or enjoyment derived from a cultural experience (i.e. a popular song or film), marked by its brief, transitory, or provisional nature [21C English, from a critical and theoretical revision of the concept guilty pleasure, a term lacking in the requisite nuance to capture the ephemeral nature of POPULAR CULTURE.]  Example usage:

With its surprisingly sophisticated beat and its catchy hook (“One big room, full of bad bitches”) and its subversive braggadocio, Kreayshawn’s hypnotically great “Gucci Gucci” is a massively rewarding temporary pleasure that may never stand the test of time but will nonetheless move enough asses in enough clubs to make this something like the stupid/brilliant anthem of 2011. (Source: unfinished blog post by Scott Votel at www.nogenremusic.com)

2) NOUN:  the limited and transitory appeal offered by a cultural object (i.e. a popular song) to a widespread audience [21C English, from a critical expansion of a previous revision of the term guilty pleasure, a term that fails to note the time-sensitive nature of products of pop culture]  Example usage:

Though Kreayshawn’s masterful “Gucci Gucci” is a subversive sugar high of pop rap, there is no indication that the bad bitch with a killer flow (and a great production team) will be able to overcome her current status as a temporary pleasure; enjoy this snarling beast of a song while you can.  (Source: unfinished blog post by Scott Votel at www.nogenremusic.com)

Usage notes:  The term temporary pleasure is slowly replacing the out-moded and out-dated guilty pleasure, though the editors of this lexicon would recommend offering a contrast between temporary pleasure and guilty pleasure until the former term gains widespread acceptance and usage.  Additionally, to avoid any logical fallacy when using temporary pleasure, it’s important to note that one does not feel a sense of cultural guilt or shame about the particular temporary pleasure; this will be sufficient in providing enough contrast in the terms.