Really happy to have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite albums of the 21st Century so far: Suburban Tours by Rangers. For Pitchfork's Sunday Review series.
It was also an opportunity to get started - possibly jumping a gun a bit, since it's only 16 years since, but why not? - on feeling nostalgic about chillwave a/k/a hypnagogic pop.
The Rangers review is also a kind of an ambivalent ode to suburbia - where I grew up, where I returned to (but not forever?) - and this is something explored previously in this essay about Ernest Hood's Neighbourhoods for The Nation.
Here's an epic 13 minute-plus track from the follow-up to Suburban Tours, the double album Pan Am Stories. "Zeke's Dream" takes the stoned-on-sunshine sound of the previous album even further, especially in the last of its several segments: a controlled explosion of ecstatic noise, two minutes of blasting bliss I could happily listen to for ten times longer. Joe Knight, self-effacing guitar hero.
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I did not know there was an Olde English Spelling Bee video for "Deerfield Village"
Another beauty from Pan Am Stories - now who is he channeling in the guitar solo? (I have my own ideas)
In the Pitchfork piece, I talk about how Suburban Tours prepared me for the move to LA in some obscure way...
A slightly fanciful thought maybe but it is true that hypnagogic pop made so much more sense to me almost the minute we arrived in Southern California (as explored in the piece on the genre for Frieze).
In David Keenan's famous Wire piece on hypnagogic, James Ferraro describes KFCs as "dark energy temples"... and my reaction, as someone then living in New York, was that it was stoned hippie drivel.... But then moving here, especially in the more featureless reaches of the San Gabriel Valley, through the endless strip malls, it's true that the fast food outlets and name-brand retailers and supermarkets like Bristol Farms can start to look a bit like ecclesiastical buildings, what with their out-size frontages and spire-like constructions calling out to you from a distance.... beacons for the faithful in the church of consumerism ... At the same time, actual ecclesiastical buildings - modern-look or even outright Modernist churches and synagogues and Scientology temples - look like megastores or shopping malls. In poorer neighbourhoods, the churches look commercial in a different sense: like bodegas or repair shop shacks... Unlike in new york or london, where fast food places are bunched together with other and much more older and characterful buildings, in LA KFCs and McDonalds and In-N-Out Burgers and Jollibees are usually separated off (realty space being cheaper) and they often have bizarre ziggurat-like or pagoda-like shapes.... at night, they really do look like peculiar plastic temples glowing with too much artificial light...
Kieran has a new weekly column atPitchfork called Rabbit Holed - exploring that world where music and meme synergize... online micro-genres and nano-genres, TikTok fads, fast-flickering vibes and evanescent energies. A filter for separating "shitpost genius from shitpassé lameness".
The latest episode is about the composers of Survivor's themes and incidental underscores and sound-FX - and the fanatics who painstakingly reconstruct pirated versions of these tunes for a cult following.
He also has a Spotify playlist for tunes currently catching his ear.
Rabbit Holed is part of a push by Pitchfork to have more personality-driven writing, with the launch of three regular columns (the others are by Meaghan Garvey and Alphonse Pierre).
A few other recent Kieran-Press Reynolds pieces:
for New York Times, a piece onStimulation Clicker, another of these torture-as-fun, Monopoly-as-overclocked-mental-collapse type videogame.
Bandying the word "apocalypse" feels a little off after the local events of last week, but here is Kieran-Press Reynolds on The TikTokalypse - a Pitchfork piece on the drastic effects of TikTok's potential banning in the USA on the memey end of music culture.
And here's another K P-R report, this time for GQ, on hopecore - "the last gasp of a less-toxic internet?".
This kind of thing brings the homilyphobe out in me.
I'd probably get on better with the spin-off subtrend Kieran further identifies - "hopeless-core", which sounds like the spirit of slacker reanimated... Processed World as digital samizdat, spores of unproductivity and demotivation circulating.
Bizarrely, both me and my son had pieces pending when the news came - and they've both just run.
One of the great things about Pitchfork is the space they've given to young writers to go wide and deep (old writers too!). Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with a thinkpiece on shitpost-modernism: "the flood of 2020s music that straddles the line between serious and silly, shattering conventions and exploding taste boundaries".
One of my favorite things - as a reader and a contributor - Pitchfork does is the Sunday Review: writers going long and deep on records the magazine never covered before, usually because they came out long before the website existed. After a tough week, it feels bittersweet to be this Sunday’s Reviewer, with a paean to Cocteau Twins and Head Over Heels, one of my favorite albums of all time.
In the piece, I reference a rave review in NME that turned my head around after initially finding the album off-putting. By Barney Hoskyns, that review can be read here at Pantheon. And here (also here as scans) is a much later piece where Barney interviews Cocteau Twins about the length and breadth of their career.
On the subject of music journalists and music journalism, there's been a lot of interesting, if necessarilyanguished commentary about what happened at Pitchfork and the future for criticism. I particularly like these thoughts for NPR music from Ann Powers, especially the last of her three points:
"To me, the best thing about music writing is that compared to other elements of the culture economy, it’s relatively useless. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machinery more than others: celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out the personae that turn artists into fetish objects....What I love about music writing , though, is that it can sidestep that productive, competitive side of culture, the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. Instead, great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else’s creative work. To really listen..... I feel nourished by the daring of my fellow scribes, by the way their words are indeed extraneous to the churn of art and emotion as product, carving out a zone where the pause matters, time spent thinking, laughing at a good line, feeling my brain crackle as it absorbs an insight.... In the end, what matters about music writing is exactly the same as what matters about music: It isn’t leading anywhere productive. Instead, it’s offering a break from the grind, a free zone for thought and a few glorious, rejuvenating moments of fun.... Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention. It witnesses the unfolding of meaning within measured time, and calls back to it"
Absolutely - music and music writing are alike in being one of life's essential inessentials. You can get by without either of them - but why would you want to?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
postscript: former Pitchfork editor in chief Mark Richardson with some fond reminiscences about colleagues who abruptly no longer work there either anymore.
Here's Joy Press with a fascinating - and heroic - tale of the first Abortion Speakout convened in 1968 by Redstockings, an offshoot of pioneering feminist outfit New York Radical Women. For Vanity Fair.
The first time this has happened - father and son convergence as firstborn Kieran Press-Reynoldsweighs in with the Official Pitchforkverdict on Dry Cleaning's Stumpwork.
I had fun writing this Pitchfork piece about Rock and the Royals - it's a kind of shadow history of "postcolonial melancholia" and entropy in the U.K., looking at the way British pop represented a new kind of national identity and pushed that image internationally almost in rivalry with the Queen and her clan. The Blitz Generation, Thatcher, Blair, and Brexit appear as well as the obvious (and less obvious) references - whimsical, surreal, iconoclastic - to Elizabeth and the Royal Fam that pop up in song across six decades of U.K. history.
In the piece, I allude to the notion of the Sixties youthquake - an eruption of newness and nowness sweeping the old order away. How irrelevant the Royals were to all that irreverence. But then I remembered a funny thing. One of the main places that you could read about all the fab trends - Mary Quant, Carnaby Street, the mods - was a magazine called Queen. They published the clued-up commentary of the very young Nik Cohn - he did a column called "Pop Scene".
The publication had started way back in 1861 as the society magazine The Queen. Under new ownership from 1957, the definite article was dropped and Queen started focusing on the younger set.
What really surprised me was that Queen publisher Jocelyn Stevens was one of the investors who financed the pirate radio station Radio Caroline. Indeed initially, the station operated out of the Queen office (although the actual broadcast signal issued from a ship named Caroline outside of British territorial waters). Stevens agitated against the idea, promoted by an official report, that there was no demand in the U.K. for commercial radio and was keen to prove the government wrong.
Towards the end of the 1960s, Queen was sold to Harper's Bizarre and merged as Harper's & Queen. Stevens carried on being involved in the newspaper business and eventually was given a knighthood by the actual Queen in 1996.
Here's a fun piece I did for Pitchfork - a guide to punk movies. Framed as the 20 Best, it was originally conceived as "from the worst to the best", which explains the insulting tone of the early entries. Below is a really insulting one - the very first entry in fact - that got cut out to make for a round 20.
CBGB (2013 – directed Randall Miller)
Considering the awesome historical material at its disposal,
CBGB is an inexplicable dud. But let’s try explicating. The late Alan
Rickman, great in costume dramas and rom-coms, makes for an awful Hilly
Kristal. Where there ought to be a charismatic center to the movie, there’s a
bleary slob with hooded eyes and a deadpan mumble. CBGB tries so hard to
be gritty, but despite the dogshit, rodents, roaches and dead Bowery bums, unreality
riddles the entire production. The punk club’s notoriously squalid toilet, for
instance, is depicted as roughly six times larger than the real one (take my
word, I’ve taken a leak there).Even the
rat in the kitchen looks groomed and shiny with health. Television’s Tom
Verlaine gets electrocuted onstage but having that happen when he’s singing the
line “lightning struck itself” from “Marquee Moon” renders it corny and
false.But the film’s largest failure is
in the area of motivation and context: it’s never really clear why Kristal started the club, how it became a magnet for malcontents and misfits, or what those
bands defined themselves against in the first place. Because the acts are
introduced as hallowed legends, The Ramones and Talking Heads and Blondie seem
like stars-to-be rather than the striving nobodies, who might easily have got
nowhere, that they actually were then.Things get even worse when The Dead Boys turn up and Kristal decides out
of all the groups they’re the ones he wants to manage. If Stiv Bators’s
self-strangulation and blowjob theatrics aren’t repulsive enough, we get to see
Rupert Grint as guitarist Cheetah Chrome exposing his pubes. CBGB was a
monster flop, grossing just $40 thousand, less than one-hundredth of its
budget. But at least they spelled the venue’s name right, rather than the
common error CGBGs.
Pleased as ever to have contributed blurbs to Pitchfork's annual best albums and best tunes end-of-year
For Albums of 2021, I celebrateDry Cleaning's New Long Leg - which features high up in the chart but not nearly high enough if you ask me.
For Songs of 2021, I delectate overOneohtrix Point Never's remix-collab with Elizabeth Fraser, "Tales from the Trash Stratum" which pops up just after the half-way mark.
Incidentally I had a different lyric at the end of the Dry Cleaning blurb- "every day is a dick". However it was pointed out to me that this is not actually the correct lyric. I contend that it should be the lyric (it certainly sounds like "every day is a dick" and I'd wager it's a very common mishearing). It's better and truer than the actual line - more expansive, less specific. I supplied a number of alternate dyspeptic lines from New Long Leg (there's no shortage) and they went with one of the best (although "sick of this shit" might have clinched it as my runner-up). Still, every day is a dick is the one really. Says it all.
A casualty of compression was the single sentence in which I acknowledge the contribution of the band, which is not inconsiderable - what they do is always apt, they are very able. But I suppose ultimately it is the Florence Show.
On which subject I'll have more to say when Blissblog does its annual and - each year ever more compact - run-down of the year's aural delights.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Meanwhile junior genreologist Kieran Press-Reynolds is doing his own looking-back-at-2021 count-down, drawing on a far larger cache of bliss. He has that young hunger to find the new sound, identify the new formation.
Our listening worlds overlap at just two points (these come later in the countdown - no spoilers). I was surprised, though, about one of the intersections.
Thursday, July 08, 2021
A busy week for Kieran Press-Reynolds.
He makes his Pitchforkdebut with a review of NYC rap crew Surf Gang's latest album SGV1, described as "amansion of sweet beats and vocal textures... husky whispers, slow-motion chirrups, reverb-laden echoes that flutter into nothingness" and with ensemble rapping that "feels like you’re watching the SoundCloud rap Avengers unite or some crossover episode between two hit TV shows".
He also makes his Bandcamp debut with a profile of the netlabel dismiss yourself - the "nexus of hex" plus other freaky online microgenres, whose catalogue offers a trove of "glitchy burps", "alien jeers", "videogame ambient," "meme-havoc" and assorted bitcrushed beauty.
And he's further been busy working at Insider, where he's done some fun pieces like this profile ofVanessa Clark a.k.a. @glitchgirlmaster, the creator of TikTok's dance-craze of the summer.
Fancy some fragrant respite from non-stop insanity and evil? Here's my essay on Virginia Astley's ambient cult classic From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, the British tradition of rhapsodic pastoralism, and the post-postpunk microtrend for Wide Brimmed Hat Pop. Part of Pitchfork's 'Sunday Review' series of appreciations of lost classics and significant albums they never covered because, well, the magazine didn't, exist yet, did it?
Below are some Gang of Four related graphics (the greatness of which I didn't have space to go into in the eulogy) interspersed with off-cuts from the piece + sundry informational nuggets.
[pic by Christopher Tomond]
Gill's stage persona - always stern and unsmiling - in his later years started to resemble Alan Rickmansworth armed with a Stratocaster.
Gang
of Four rearranged the structural grammar of rock as music while reinventing the way that lyrics could process and probe political reality. “There’s almost nothing in Gang of Four that relates to anything a purist would
describe as ‘punk’. Most punk rock was slightly
faster and slightly worse-played heavy metal. Whereas Gang of Four is stripped
down, it’s funky, there’s no power-chords.There’s
very little about it that’s punky” - Andy Gill, 2001.
Several years before G04, while still at Sevenoaks School, the teenage Andy Gill and Jon King had dabbled with being a band. They called themselves the Bourgeois Brothers!
Waiting for the Great Leap Forward...
Although it's taken from the ruling cabal in Mao's China - and would later be applied to the leadership of the SDP – the name "Gang of Four" is like a demystified version of "the band". It takes the piss out of the adolescent romanticism and male-bonding camaraderie of rock 'n' roll - the idea of the group heading out on an adventure together - while hinting that those very energies could be channeled for higher purposes, a true mission-quest.
The Wilko influence: Johnson didn't exactly "slap" the strings, he sort of cuffed them - flicked at them with the tops of his fingernails (as opposed to picking with his fingertips) while muting the strings with his other hand, to get that choppy percussive sound. Gill himself used a plectrum, I believe, but built from Wilko's jagged rhythm style.
The emergence of the Leeds Sound. With Gang of Four, it’s angular and spartan; with Delta 5, it’s
loping and bouncy; with The Mekons, it’s loose and blurting... but there are
similar riff-structures and approaches to the guitar as a primarily rhythmic
instrument; there are textural affinities in terms of scrawny abrasiveness; vocally there’s a shared deployment of catchy but unmelodic chants, a gruff
flatness of address, and a general departure from rock’n’roll norms of singing
and emoting.
Gill’s first great guitarist crush had been Jimi Hendrix. On the day of his death in September 1970, the teenage Gill wore a black armband to school. But in Gang of Four, the volcanically cascading solos of Hendrix and other guitar-heroes of the pre-punk era were strictly forbidden.
“Andrew was… I was about to say he
was a ‘master baiter’! But he would bait you” - Hugo Burnham
The title track of their 1978 debut
EP, Damaged Goods, used the language of commerce to present a
startlingly unsentimental anatomy of desire and frustration.
It wasn’t just the controlled paroxysm
of Gill’s playing on songs like “Natural’s Not In It” that was so bracingly
abrasive. It was the sound too. Clipped and clean, it came from using transistor
amps rather than the valve amps that most guitarists then and now prize for
their “warmth” and “fat” richness of tone. “It’s more brittle,” Gill said
of his beloved transistorized sound. “And it's not warm – Gang of Four
were against warmth.”
“The
production has got to bring out the material incidents in a perfectly sober and
matter-of-fact way. Nowadays the play’s meaning is usually blurred by the fact
that the actor plays to the audience’s hearts…. They ought to be presented
quite coldly… objectively. For they are not a matter for empathy; they are
there to be understood.” - Bertolt Brecht, 1926, prophesying "Love Like Anthrax"
The scouring power of dour.
“People value themselves in terms of their labour yet leisure time brings an uncomfortable void” was how the group paraphrased the topic in a brief statement on the B-side label of “At Home He's A Tourist”. The flipside itself “It’s Her Factory” was straightforward feminist critique of housewives’ and home-makers’ unpaid labour, inspired by an newspaper article about housewives as ‘the Unsung Heroines of Britain’.
“Generally there is felt to be a very sharp distinction between learning and amusing oneself…. So we have to defend [radical theatre] against the suspicion that is it a highly disagreeable, humourless, indeed strenuous affair” ---Bertolt Brecht, from “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre For Instruction?”
Entertainment! was the party soundtrack in Athens, Georgia for a season or two, influencing art-school bands from that town from Pylon to Method Actors to R.E.M. B-52s's first two albums were essentially Entertainment! if it's lyrical content and stage presentation was had been derived from mass entertainment - in this case post-WW2 American B-movies, TV, mainstream fads, etc - and emotionally based around amused fascination rather than disdain and distaste. No, really - look beneath the camp chassis of Fred + Kate + Cindy's lyrics, voices, and clothes, you'll find an undercarriage of sinewy
dance-rock rhythm, as spare and pared as the spray paint job was garish.
The verse in "I Found That Essence Rare" about the girl dressed in a bikini not knowing the name comes from the Pacific Ocean nuclear test site Bikini Atoll is the exact point where the Go4 and the B's meet.
“No escape from society” - a Gramscian
aside in a song ("Natural's Not In It") that otherwise offers a fractured-vision panorama of a
consumerist paradise, a “heaven” that “gives me migraine”, as King’s
protagonist sings it.
Key line: “coercion of the senses”, referring to the
bullying bombardment of libidinally-charged imagery from media and advertising - what Marcuse called “repressive desublimation” i.e. sex and desire put in
service of capital.
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Ideal of a new purchase
A market of the senses
Dream of the perfect life
Economic circumstances
The body is good business
Sell out, maintain the interest
This heaven gives me migraine
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Coercion of the senses
We are not so gullible
Our great expectations
A future for the good
Fornication makes you happy
No escape from society
Natural is not in it
Your relations are of power
We all have good intentions
But all with strings attached
Repackaged sex keeps your interest
Like the earlier Damaged Goods EP tune “Armalite Rifle”, “Ether” addressed the troubles in Northern Ireland, its lyrical tail-sting hinting that the British authorities's interest in keeping a foothold in Ulster might be economic as much as geo-strategic: "there may be oil / under Rockall" - i.e. the granite islet and surrounding sea 263 miles northwest of Ireland. “Guns Before Butter” took its inspiration from John Heartfield’s
1934 anti-fascist photomontage “Hurrah, The Butter Is All Gone” – a
riposte to Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s remark that “iron always make a
country strong, butter and lard only make people fat.”
For 1981’s Solid Gold, the group
recruited Jimmy Douglass, a sound engineer who'd worked for funk band Slave and for AC/DC among others and would later be Timbaland right-hand man, in order to help them achieve a “live” sound with more bass bottom. The resulting sound on Solid Gold contrasted markedly with the
compellingly arid and anti-naturalistic (no room ambience, no reverb) production style of Entertainment!
Gill supplied the most striking sounding and emotionally compelling tune on the album in the desolate faltering funk of “Paralysed”, which he wrote and recited: seemingly the blues of a victim of the mass unemployment induced by Thatcher-Reagan, the character knows “history’s the reason / I’m washed up” but can’t help feel humiliatingly shamed by his own fate.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ And how sadly weird / weirdly sad that Andy Gill's namesake - the otherpostpunk-associatedAndy Gill - should have died less than a year ago. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I really enjoyed contributing to the Pitchfork lists of The 50 Best Movie Scores of All Time and The 50 Best Movie Soundtracks of All Time. The original plan was for a single unified list but there were so many suggestions from the electorate that it got split into two, although the distinction between score and soundtrack can get blurry with some films having a mixture of all-new and preexisting musical elements.
In these lists, there are lots of films with great scores and soundtracks I'd forgotten about, and many that I didn't know at all - loads here to investigate and read about.
Quite a few of the ones I voted for didn't make the cut - below are some faves that did not get ratified by the electorate.
BEDAZZLED – Dudley Moore
As well as starring as the haplessStanley Moon, who sells his soul to the devil for seven wishes, Dudley
Moore - being a jazz pianist, songwriter
and arranger of considerable talent - wrote the score to this Sixties Brit caper,
variations on a theme that are rendered by turns insouciant, idyllic, poignant,
and snazzy. There’s also a pair of brilliant Sixties pop parodies: “Love Me” (performed
by Moore with moist passion) and “Bedazzled”, on which Peter Cook deadpans his
disdain and indifference to all amorous advances - ‘you fill me with INERTIA”.
RIP Stanley Donen, the director.
FORBIDDEN PLANET – Louis and Bebe Barron
For one of the superior science fiction movies of the 1950s, this
husband and wife team created the first entirely electronic score in movie
history: an abstract, virtually atonal sequence of drones, shrieks, groans and
pulsations that seem to reverberate from the coldest, blackest recesses of deep
space. But because the Barrons were credited ambiguously with "electronic
tonalities", they were cheated of a chance to contend for an Oscar for
Best Soundtrack.
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN – Gil Melle
A sci-fi thriller about scientists investigating a lethal super-virus
of extraterrestrial origin in an isolated white-walled underground laboratory
gets an appropriately chilly and sterile-sounding score from jazzer turned
instrument-inventor. Melle used found industrial sounds like jet propulsion lab
blasts and roars and transformed them by
tape-editing.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK-
John Carpenter
One of the director/composer's best, ranging from bloodcurdling, borderline-abstract sequences
like "The Crazies Come Out" to more melodic synth-pulse propelled
tunes like "Orientation #2," which glides along like an empty
monorail car coldly surveying the ravaged city below.
BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS – Stu Philips & Bob Stone, et al
Russ Meyer’s mischievously over-the-top camp satire of the rock biz and Los Angeles decadence gets an equally ersatz superb set of songs. Performed in the movie by the fictitious all-girl group The Carrie Nations, the vocals actually came from the off-screen session singer Lynn Carey, a blue-eyed soul powerhouse. There’s also contributions by “real” psych pop group Strawberry Alarm Clock and a kitschy theme song by The Sandpipers,
LOGAN’S RUN – Jerry Goldsmith
Partly orchestral, partly synth, the veteran movie composer’s O/S/T
is particularly stunning on the icy electronica of “Flameout” and “Fatal Games”
and the pulsating pornodelia of"Love Shop," which scores a sequence in which the hero and
heroine's escape through a strobe-blitzed brothel of the future.
THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY – Francis Monkman
Formerly of prog rock group Curved Air, Monkman whips together an
unexpectedly jazzy and funky OST for this Brit gangland thriller – at its most
strutting and flamboyant on the main theme, which bookends the movie and accompanies
the abrupt downfall of Bob Hoskins’s East London mobster to make for one of
cinema’s most exhilarating outro sequences.
THX 1138 - OST by Lalo Schifrin; “sound montages” by Walter
Murch
Schifrin’s orchestral score for George Lucas’s dystopian movie is
somber and impressive in its own right. But what really makes THX such a
compellingly total audio-visual experience are Murch’s sound design, effects
and underscores: sourceless shudders and judders, abject squelches, android
death-rattles, shearing-metal groans, and, not least, the electronic garbling and distortion applied
to the voices of the bureaucrats who surveil every citizen constantly.
Here's some other faves that did not get the nod.
Stalker
The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle Rosemary’s Baby
Liquid Sky
Dark Star
Zardoz
Barbarella
Klute Gregory’s Girl The Draughtsman's Contract The Parallax View And these are ones I voted for that did get ratified Under the Skin Dazed and Confused The Good the Bad and the Ugly Taxi Driver 2001, A Space Odyssey The Wicker Man Suspiria Midnight Cowboy
