NO GENRE

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A song called “Climax” by Usher (and produced by Diplo!) should be the horniest jam of the year.  It should be studded with colorful dots of candle wax or stained with the sweat of an overworked synthline.  At any rate, it should not sound anything like “Climax” actually does.  Which is exactly what makes this song so weirdly remarkable.  The titular, um, conclusion is not product of a romantic evening with Usher Raymond IV; it’s the stalled ending of a relationship replete with a clutching sense of desperation.  Not that Usher has ever been a master at the bait-and-switch, but I’m sure a lot of folks reaching for their Hulkshare accounts were pulled in hook, line, and sinker.  For his part, Diplo shows admirable restraint in crafting the faintest supporting beat that teasingly falls away just as soon as Usher is gearing up for a big moment.  Though he’s never been known for his subtlety, Diplo manages to find a musical analog to the frustrating sense of something stalled in the middle of blossoming.  Diplo’s trick is probably too clever by half, but the guile seems more than worth it when you realize you find yourself listening to this little gem on repeat.

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Grimes’ excellent third album, Visions, presents No Genre with a difficult critical challenge.  On the one hand, I feel compelled to try to say something intelligent about an album that has more than earned the right to be pondered.  But on the other, the album is so good that I’m a little stuck writing anything like a cogent argument in its defense, which keeps leading me to idiotically simple thoughts (e.g. “Visions is a good album”).  So, we’ll just go ahead and indulge both impulses because Visions has clearly been speaking to these two sides of me.

Attempted Cogent Argument #1

One of the most intellectually rewarding albums last year was John Maus’ We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, an arch electro-pop dissertation on the theoretical and emotional confines of synthetic music.  As cast by Maus himself, the album was an occasion to do some serious thinking about the reification of nostalgia, especially with regard to reclaiming analog instruments in the service of some vague (and backwards) concept of authenticity.  I thought a lot about We Must Become as I listened to Visions.  Both albums invite a sincere consideration of the ways in with analog instruments have been reconfigured for retro-futuristic ends that serve their masters but not their inspirations.

Idiotically Simple Thought #1

Grimes’ new album, Visions, is a good album.  You will like listening to it.  Probably.  I don’t know, actually.  But I think it’s good.  Let me tell you some reasons why I like this good album.  I think a lot of the songs are good songs.  Most of the songs on this album are good.  There really are not that many bad songs.

Attempted Cogent Argument #2

But Clair Boucher is interested in much more than creating theoretical set pieces for some deep thinking about musical culture in the early years of the 21st century.  Maus used analog electronic gear as a means to an end to make a complicated point about how he was not using them as a means to an end and that everyone else, in fact, was using them as a means to an end.  Where Visions trumps We Must Become is how Boucher uses more or less the same aesthetic simply as a means to an end.  She appears to be totally uninterested in the ways in which her carefully crafted electro-witchcraft reflects the cultural superstructure of nostalgia and re-appropriation.  Which is ultimately to her credit because it allows her to get down to the business of writing memorable songs that flirt with your brain and your heart.

Idiotically Simple Thought #2

I really like the song “Genesis.”  It is a really good song.  I have listened to the song “Genesis” about 34 times in the past few days.  I think it might be a love song.  But it also might be a song about heartbreak.  I don’t really know.  But whatever kind of song “Genesis” is, I really like it a lot.  The Grimes woman is really good at writing songs.  Her name is Clair Boucher.  That’s a nice name, I think.

Attempted Cogent Argument #3

As the album’s centerpiece, “Genesis” is the album’s emotional and aesthetic watchword, a darkly bouncy paradox whose coyness belies its boldness.  While the primary synth line is practically cribbed from Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” the vocal filigree is reminiscent of a more outgoing Julianna Barwick.  And that’s about as apt a description as I can summon: an organically fragile voice both buffeted and buoyed by an array of electronic instrumentation.  Elsewhere, Boucher toys with familiar pop idioms, especially the vaguely anthemic “Vowels = Space and Time,”  a song that liberally borrows from techno diva rundowns.  And “Oblivion,” with its grimly romantic refrain “See you on a dark night,” is cutesy goth dressed in bubbling synths.  All over this album, Boucher’s vaporous voice, floating somewhere vaguely above or behind the mix, contrasts beautifully with the tight, crisp production.  Lyrically, Boucher is a heart-on-sleeve hopeless romantic.  When she breathily confesses that she would say “yes” on “Symphonia IX (My Wait is U),” the line stands as a sort of confirmation that for Boucher it’s all worth the pain and the heartache that hides just behind each of these beauties.

Idiotically Simple Thought #3

Some of the songs sound like songs I probably heard at a middle school dance.  Or kind of like them.  Like they have been updated or something.  They are some pretty special songs.  I really like the one called “Oblivion.”  I guess I would not have heard that at a middle school dance.  Hahaha, unless I went to an all-girls school in Transylvania!  Hahahaha.  Anyway, I think you will probably like some of these songs.  Probably.  I don’t know.  Maybe you don’t like songs that sound like these songs.  Other songs I like are “Symphonia IX (My Wait is U)” and “Vowels = Space and Time.”  Those songs are good songs, but they have weird names.  Another good song is “Visiting Statue,” but it is too short.  Some of the songs are too short on this album.  But some of the songs are just right.  Like the porridge that Goldilocks liked the best.

Attempted Cogent Argument #4

Great albums contain multitudes.  They only ask for what a listener is willing to give.  And in this way, Visions is either a masterpiece of reclaimed pop idioms—electro, R&B, minimal wave, Top 40, synth pop—or it is simply a beguilingly engaging album of would-be hits for the indie set.  Visions can be an occasion for you to consider the depths to which Moroder’s pioneering synth work has been ingrained in the 21st century American underground pop imagination, or it can simply be a collection of stellar songs by an impish fairy with a backbone.  Either way, Visions is the first truly great album of the year because it will be all things to all people.  It will inspire as many fanboys lighting up the blogs as it will think pieces in Tiny Mix Tapes.  It will soundtrack as many lonely walks home alone as it will make out sessions.

Idiotically Simple Thought #4

It is probably easy to think really hard about this album.  I don’t understand a lot of the reviews that I have read.  I do not know what ‘post-internet’ is.  I am glad that some people think big things about this good album.  I am satisfied with just listening to it.  But you should think big things about it if you want to.  Maybe that is what makes the album so good.  You can think big things, and I can just think my simple thoughts.  That makes this album an 8.5 album in my book.

Rating: 8.5 / 10

There they all are up there, feet joined together in a biologically unholy pair of Chucks:  Damon Albarn’s gawky 2D, Jamie Hewitt’s sinister Murdoc, André 3000′s crypto-watchman, and James Murphy’s serene baboon sensei.  And the collaboration sounds but exactly like you would expect it to sound.  It’s patently obvious who is responsible for each element of the song.  Besides the laconic 2D act, the bouncy 303 bassline bears the fingerprints of Albarn, while the supremely tight beat is Murphy’s creation through and through.  The song’s highlight, though, belongs to André 3000 and his virtuosic verse that serves as the song’s tent pole.  Like watching Ocean’s Eleven, you get the sense that these couple of guys had a blast in the studio together.  Or at least a good enough time that an open plea for a new Outkast album closes out the party.

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If you’ve ever spent even a nominal amount of time around other human beings, you’ve no doubt noticed the fact that talent is as common as dirt.  Cruise around the internet’s most astute music blogs, and you’ll see a disparate community of DIY geniuses holed up in their bedrooms creating stuff that rivals the best of whatever the tastemaker-est labels can release in a fiscal year.  Cherry-picking the best of them is sometimes a daunting task because I could spend all day writing blurbs for everything that catches my ear.  But sometimes, I fall in love with something before the song is even over, before I even have a chance to understand what has caught my attention.  The latest musical crush I’ve developed is over Arca’s achingly smooth and syrupy “Spira.”  But what makes this different from the legion of bedroom producers throwing around woozy beats and warped R&B samples?  Ambition.  Lots and lots of ambition.  The song is clenched within thirty seconds, and yet Arca allows it to evolve into something entirely different, a twitchy dance number that is miles away from where it started.  It’s a gutsy first move, but it’s one that complicates the expectations for a second.  And that takes no small amount of talent.

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The oddest tribute to Whitney Houston has to be American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman’s monologue about her self-titled debut album:

It’s hard to choose a favorite among so many great tracks, but “The Greatest Love of All” is one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation, dignity. Its universal message crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it’s not too late to better ourselves. Since, Elizabeth, it’s impossible in this world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves. It’s an important message, crucial really. And it’s beautifully stated on the album.

What’s particularly odd, to me, about this speech is that it was fully true of Houston in the novel’s cultural setting of a decadent America in the late 80s.  Bret Easton Ellis is, of course, fucking with us: Houston, for whatever else she ultimately represented, was the queen of soft, unoffensive pablum custom built for hits.  But what’s tragic about it, of course, is that it doesn’t prefigure Houston’s series of mental and physical and spiritual collapses.  By the late 90s, Houston had become a parody of divahood, a tragic case study in superstardom and substance abuse.  Though she had become a grotesque shell of her former self, you always got the sense, like with Michael Jackson, that she still had enough innate talent to wangle some kind of comeback.

And, my God, that talent!  There’s a cynical way of reading Houston’s career—i.e. her vapid pop was so slick and dull and commercial that it scarcely seems human.  And though I’m a little sympathetic to that reading, it’s impossible to ignore this woman’s voice.  Just listen to the captivating acapella version of “How Will I Know” that is being bandied about on a lot of the online tributes and remembrances.  And that voice will forever and always be that note from “I Will Always Love You.”  You know the note: it’s the show-stopper, the one that raises the hairs on your arm, the one that prevents even a casual listening of the song.  That single sustained note carries Houston’s entire career: everything Houston ever was and could have been is embodied in that single note.  But like Bateman’s monologue, there’s nothing in that note that suggests anything like the genuinely tragic mess at Whitney Houston would become.  In that sense, then, that note is a cliché, an overly familiar narrative trope whereby someone with startling talent squanders and wastes it after allowing it to flower for the briefest of moments.  It’s the oldest, most boring story in pop culture, and this latest chapter is just as dead sad as any of the dozens of others.

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There are two Andrew Birds in constant competition with one another: a fabricator of intricate torch songs (the aching “Armchairs”) and a colorful ringleader of giddy pop (the ebullient “Fitz and the Dizzyspells”).  At his best, though, Bird tangles these competing aesthetics into an admirably knotty composition that feels paradoxically loose and tight (“Fake Palindromes,” “Simple X,” “Plasticities”).  As the lead single of his forthcoming Break It Yourself, “Eyeoneye” is as neat of a summary of Bird’s artistic concerns as anything you could find in his back catalog.  Even at his most straightforward—those choruses practically bash away—the elegantly crafted “Eyeoneye” is built of the finest pop material Bird can find, including that signature whistle.

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There’s a fundamental difference between songs that you learn to love and songs that you can’t help but love.  The former requires an ear for detail, while the latter simply requires ears.  Timbah’s beautifully constructed “Can’t Love Without You” is everything I’ve loved in bass music for the past couple of years: languid bass swells, glitchy pixillation at the mix’s edges, pitch-shifted R&B samples.  What it lacks in groundbreaking originality, it more than makes up for it its undeniable command of form.  What initially feels a little loose, a little unfocused, is actually a tightly controlled progression from relative simplicity to intricate complexity.  By the end of the track, Timbah has nearly introduced more elements into the song than you can follow.  Which is to say, I guess, that some songs reward an ear for detail as much as they do a pair of ears by themselves.

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Aaaand we’re back after a much needed sabbatical.

While I spent much of my self-imposed break reacquainting myself with long lost favorites (seriously, the Isley Brothers’ Givin’ It Back is super-incredible!), I have really be struggling to be terribly interested in a lot of new stuff I have heard in January.  Thankfully, Jamie XX’s (sorta) latest track, “Touch Me,” (sorta) came out (sorta) officially.  It’s a revision of a track that’s been floating around for exactly a year, but now he’s surgically removed Yasmin’s husky vocals, leaving nothing but a clean steel drum workout.  While the song borrows its basic vocabulary from “Far Nearer,” “Touch Me” is much more interested in spreading the love around, instead of focusing its love energy on a single object of its affection.  It’s a sunny Caribbean dance party for those of us who heard the news this morning that there’s going to be six more weeks of winter.