NO GENRE

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From the press release accompanying Grouper’s new (lost) album:

When I was a teenager the wreckage of a sailboat washed up on the shore of Agate Beach. The remains of the vessel weren’t removed for several days. I walked down with my father to peer inside the boat cabin. Maps, coffee cups and clothing were strewn around inside.  I remember looking only briefly, wilted by the feeling that I was violating some remnant of this man’s presence by witnessing the evidence of its failure. Later I read a story about him in the paper. It was impossible to know what had happened. The boat had never crashed or capsized. He had simply slipped off somehow, and the boat, like a riderless horse, eventually came back home.

The haunting image of that man slipping into the aquatic wasteland of the ocean, his boat faithfully completing its meaningless journey, is more or less the perfect analogue to Liz Harris’ music.  Grouper is the sound the ceaseless specter of death, a figure casting long shadows on the mind in the middle of the night.  Just look at the nail-biting apprehension on display on The Man Who Died in His Boat‘s cover.

But Harris’ project isn’t entirely about the daily gloom of existential meaninglessness.  On her collaborative album with Tiny Vipers last year, the beguiling but rewarding Mirrorring, Harris solidified a couple of points about her aesthetic.  First, the album suggested that Harris’ primary idiom isn’t gray washes of ambient prettiness but backwoods folk.  At the same time, though, it demonstrated that obfuscation, not clarification, is her first order concern as an artist.  She wants to bury, to distort, to stretch something so far out of proportion that it scarcely resembles what it, in fact, is.  And though her recent work on the Violet Replacement project has tended toward ambient soundscapes, Grouper’s most character work, played at a proper pace and dusted free of its tape hiss and cavernous reverb, might actually sound recognizably folky.

To that end, The Man Who Died on His Boat sits comfortably next to Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill.  Evidently, the two albums were recorded at the same time, so it’s no surprise that the lonesome twang of Harris’ guitar on the achingly pretty “Cover the Long Way” and “Vital” sound similar to past gems like “Heavy Water/I’d Rather be Sleeping” and “We’ve All Gone to Sleep.”  But to suggest, though, that these songs function in any way like clear-eyed folk is misleading.  The title track, a spare acoustic number, is marked by the delicate balance between Harris’ fragile voice and the quietly insistent strum of her guitar.  At times, the steady beat of the guitar seems to carry the note directly from her mouth into the chilliest corners of the mix.  The barely-there “Difference (voices)” bridges the gap between the record’s most cleanly structured songs and its ambient experiments.  There are recognizable notes plucked on the over-amped guitar, but they are quickly swallowed up by foggy sheets of vaguely pulsating noise.  The strictly noise pieces, particularly the haunting closer “STS,” contain enough trace elements of recognizable musical composition that you lean closer, trying to discern the source of Harris’ alien sound.

When Grouper played the Guggenheim last April, Harris sat on a small carpeted stage at the base of Wright’s emblematic staircase.  That is, she literally sat on a swatch of carpet on the stage.  The audience, too, sat on the carpeted floor.  For comparison sake, Julianna Barwick, who was playing a double bill with Harris, stood during her set.  The audience stood as well.  This seems significant to me.  Barwick’s celestial exaltation demands that you stand, that you offer yourself to a grand wash of melody.  Grouper’s music, quiet and sad without ever quite being dour, will never inspire an audience to its feet in reverential splendor.  But it will allow you to peek into the mysterious boat of a dead man just so long as you sit quietly and listen.

Rating: 7.5 / 10

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With beats cut with lasers and basslines carved out of pure midnight, Nosaj Thing sits right in that sweet spot between Schlohmo’s melancholy and Flying Lotus’ glitchy electrojazz.  Though Jason Chung certainly shares certain affinities with the Brainfeeder crowd (subtle bass manipulation, off-kilter beatcraft), his refined palate for crisply understated production makes him an different beast altogether.  Though I could easily imagine throwing on some Schlohmo remixes while someone passed around the bowl, Nosaj Thing’s new album, Home, seems better suited to quietly unspooling a line of thought to yourself.

Chung was only 24 when Drift was released in 2009, and it’s clear that it is a young man’s record.  It exuberantly chases new sounds, refusing to settle too long on any one idea.  From the mechanical sparkle of “Ioio” to the stately choir of “Lords,” Drift featured a broad palette of sounds that contributed to the album’s success.  Home, though, is marked by a much narrower aesthetic, which sounds to me like Chung is demonstrating patience rather than running out of ideas.  The album is anchored by a pair of collaborations: Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino shows up on the urgent “Eclipse/Blue” and Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick floats through the tender “Try.”  More or less traditionally structured, these songs inform the mutated pop DNA that codes much of Chung’s instrumentals.  All over the album, Chung isolates melodic elements and pushes them forward in the mix (the channel-hopping synth on “Snap” is perhaps the most successful) and treats them in much the same way he treats Makino’s voice.  And just like Bundick’s soft falsetto is hidden behind bright sheets of synths, Chung frequently buries is best ideas, rewarding careful listening in the process.  Spot the haunted vocals in “Glue” or the rhythmic breathing in “Phase III.”  Such is Chung’s attention to detail that Home, a quietly reflective album, played at any volume on any medium reveals itself slowly.

What this meticulous attention ultimately signals to me, though, is not just that Home is a richly rewarding album but that it represents the maturation of Chung’s sound.  Here, he is more confident in his own craft, creating almost hierarchical layers in the mix.  He stacks the most important elements near the surface and lets the weirder ideas simmer and bubble just underneath the finely wrought beats.  Again, though Nosaj Thing shares obvious parallels with the folks at Brainfeeder, Home is the moment where he starts to come into his own, sacrificing alien funk for spacious furniture music.

Rating: 7 / 10

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So says the man himself: ”Django was ill without it.”  Tarantino tactfully declined to use the song in Django Unchained, citing respect for Ocean’s ambitious intentions behind the song.  And after a quick scan of the lyric sheet, it’s hard not to see that the troubadour’s nuanced take on masculinity was perhaps a little too subtle for Tarantino’s gory slave revenge fable.  Not that Django was a ham-fisted exploration the evil that men visit upon one another; it’s just that Ocean is interested in what happens to men once they become dehumanized from slavery, while Tarantino is ultimately more interested in what happens to men once they shuffle off the chains.  The song itself is a delicate ballad built around the shimmering vibrato of Morricone-style guitars and mandolins, and Ocean’s voice has never sounded stronger, confidently holding his notes firmly to let them register the heartrending lyrics:  ”The beast will crawl this earth/Then fall in the dirt to feed the crows/They’re rip apart his flesh/Til all that’s left is glorious bone.”  While Django was plenty ill without it, it’s all too easy to imagine the impact of watching Calvin Candie order a helpless slave to be torn apart by feral dogs to plaintive strains of “Wiseman.”

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The rich thud of the kick drum is the dead giveaway.  Whatever microphone ultimately captured that magnificent thump was obviously placed there by James Murphy.  And what better producer could have kindled the disco inferno burning within Pulp’s five minute comeback special than the man behind DFA?  The song is a decade old demo that was initially written for We Love Life, but you can sort of see why it never made it on the album.  On the surface, the clipped bassline and the urgent rush of the cymbals of “After You” would have seemed glaringly out of place on an album haunted by the regrets that pile up in old age.  But listen carefully to the song’s rousing final verse: “I can’t explain why I need to be free/But if you need to be naked that’s alright by me/It’s a fast track express to the graveyard, I know/So what are you waiting for, hey ho let’s go!”  That may as well be Pulp’s (and LCD Soundsystem’s) mission statement summed up in a pair of tidy couplets.

“If someone believed me, they would be as in love with you as I am.”

Love requires credulity. Think about it as a basic belief that a lover’s words and actions correspond to some kind of abstract but nonetheless tangible reality in the most ineffable parts of a person.  It’s a leap of faith, really.  And communicating that reality is often presented as a kind of negation (e.g. “I would die without you.”).  So it’s interesting that Romy Croft’s declaration of love is a negation of this credulity: if I was able to explain to anyone else just how much I love you, they, themselves, would fall inexorably in love with you, too.  That is to say, her paramour is powerful stuff.  To underscore the aching sincerity of the sentiment, Croft’s delicate lisp is backed by the studied minimal R&B that made the band’s debut such an understated treasure.  And if possible, “Angels” is even more not-there than anything on xx, a sign of the growing confidence of a band whose boldness pushes them to communicate the incommunicable.

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Telephoned’s luxurious cover of Fity and Nate Dogg’s “21 Questions” is so gimmicky that it obviously suffers from no shortage of genius.  Especially when you realize that Midi Mafia’s Dre-biting beat has been replaced by Clams Casino’s based ethereality “I’m God.”  And this would all be too strange to take seriously if Maggie Horn’s weary vocals didn’t find the aching pathos in Nate Dogg’s argument-baiting refrain.

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I don’t know about where you live, but there’s still enough of a chill in the air in Boston to justify throwing on The-Dream’s smooth new love jam, “Kill the Lights,” and curling up next to a warm body.  While the song’s production is stellar (as always), its secret weapon is Casha, a relative newcomer with an enticingly breathy voice.  And when they coo, “Let me set fire to the darkness,” you kind of hope that spring never bothers showing up because you’re plenty warm enough.

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“So you should pump this shit, like they do in the future.”

It’s a brag line that seems particularly suited to El-P in his unique role as fabulator of futuristic hyperlyrical boom-bap.  Since even before Def Jux funcrushed independent hip-hop into entirely new shapes over a decade ago, El-P has served as a production wizard whose alchemical black magic remains both spooky and beguiling.  Even with the slow roll out of his own solo material (the upcoming Cancer for Cure is only his third album in the past ten years), El-P is still a story in a field that doesn’t accomodate stories after the initial glow from the hype machine fades.  And “The Full Retard,” the latest glimpse from Cancer for Cure, will ensure that El-P remains an integral part of the conversation about just how much more hip-hop can do in this day in age.  But more importantly, if “The Full Retard” and “Drones Over BRKLYN” are any indication of the direction of Cancer for Cure, then it seems entirely likely that we’ll all be pumping this shit well into the future.

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I woke up this morning with a plan: I was going to drink some coffee, read a substantial amount of Nicholson Baker’s joyously filthy new novel House of Holes, then I was going to do some laundry and work on my own writing for a while.  Those plans unraveled quickly when I noticed that Beach House had released a new song, “Myth,” from their supposedly forthcoming new album, Bloom.  See, Beach House has entered that pantheon of bands for whom I will stop everything.  I never get around to listening to Beach House at this point because Beach House is always immediately and enduringly rewarding.  And it’s forever and always the same thing with Beach House that brings me back.  It’s the careful interplay between Scally’s precise guitar work and Legrand’s droning keyboards; it’s the mechanical yet weirdly organic percussion that engines their songs.  It’s the way that Legrand can remain cool, almost distant for much of a song only to open herself up late in the song to bare something vulnerable and sincere.  It’s the way that at this point in their remarkable career, Beach House, as a musical unit, have figured out how to continue to write Beach House songs that always expand their aesthetic boundaries to accomodate a wider definition of what a Beach House song can be.  It’s the way that this modest little band from Baltimore has quickly become one of the most reliably great indie acts in American right now.  It’s the way that “Silver Soul” and “Gila” and “Real Love” and “Apple Orchard” and “Holy Dances” still find their way into personal mixtapes that focus on everything from swooning romance to gentle melancholy.  It’s the way that I have listened to “Myth” literally a dozen times this morning without the slightest worry that its essentially made a mess of my carefully planned morning.

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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.