a grammar

prinzhorn dance school

A very quick Vulture take on Prinzhorn Dance School — a band I find pretty endlessly fascinating — and their new album,Clay Class.

I’m pretty sure I could spend 10,000 words circling and trying to pin down the things I hear in this band; they make music in a totally lateral, unexpected way, which winds up creating all sorts of strange and hard-to-describe effects when you spend enough time listening to it. Lateral by design, both as an agenda (Hans Prinzhorn, the German psychiatrist they named themselves after, studied artwork by the mentally ill), and as a working method (they allegedly write their songs by arguing over graphs and diagrams).

If you missed their 2007 self-titled debut, I recommend it highly.

important retraction / note on camp

The first time I wrote about Lana Del Rey, in a column, a few months back, I said I was pleased that when she invoked the name “Lolita,” she actually seemed to be talking about something like the character in the novel, and not whatever strange mincing porny thing people use that name to refer to today.

Now, having heard her song “Lolita,” I would like to apologize and mostly retract that.

I wrote a review of her album for Vulture, findable here. I suppose the bullet points are as follows: It’s a so-so moody pop record that stumbles around a bit, and there are things about Del Rey’s attempt to pull off a persona that are campily interesting and/or poignant, and a lot of it reminds me of Showgirls. I have many more thoughts and feelings about related topic,* but I’m sure there’s more than enough to read about this artist at the moment, so I’ll save the bulk of them for another time.

Except for one thing. One novel I really adore is Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s about two prisoners, in Argentina, sharing a cell: Molina’s there because he’s gay, and accused of corrupting a minor; Valentin’s there because he’s a leftist revolutionary. Through most of the novel, Molina is recounting to Valentin, from memory, the plots of films he loves. He has a keen memory for the sensual, glamorous, swooning side of them.

One of the films he recounts is, essentially, a Nazi propaganda thriller, and he describes the things in it the way the film sees them — at some point, he’s describing all the beautiful, masculine German soldiers marching through Paris. This annoys Valentin, who challenges him on it. And Molina’s answer, as I remember it, is to just let the issue pass for a moment, and appreciate the type of beauty that this film, right or wrong, is trying to offer at that moment.

And that issue, the thing that’s contested between them at that moment, has more to do with “camp” than laughing at things because you think they’re bad — to me, camp is always about seeing some overblown proposition of what beauty is, and knowing that the fundamentals behind it, the belief system it grew out of, is defunct or rotten or collapsed. It’s like a touchingly grand expression of a belief that has no worthwhile purchase on the world.

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projects that will have to happen later

I keep thinking about the sound of that Destroyer album we were discussing the other day, its supposed lite-jazz uncoolness. Something else occurs to me: There’s a reason I always wind up using the term new-wave to describe it. There was a period, in the later 80s and the very beginning of the 90s, when a lot of rock, indie, and new-wave types, mostly English ones, had grown up into making breezy, sophisticated pop — albums that would not be afraid of featuring a fretless bass or sax solo. A sort of upscale, blazer-wearing era of college rock, full of the sounds of 80s studio-pop ambition. The era when people like Morrissey, Ian McCulloch, and Peter Murphy started making solo albums. The kind of music Dan Bejar was presumably reading about if he was really flipping through Melody Maker in his late teenage years.

Alt-rock helped kill that stuff in the early 90s — being upscale and elaborate went pretty quickly out of fashion — and these days a lot of it really does sound like a particular dated or “uncool” era. Morrissey’s career is actually an amazing timeline on that front: In 1991, on Kill Uncle, he was singing stuff like this; by the next year, he had a whole muscular rock band behind him.

Kaputt would have fit pretty easily into that context. (It’s a context I liked, too; that’s what certain shows on my local college station sounded like when I was 13. The ones that played Pet Shop Boys a lot.) Hopefully I can steal some time after the holidays to make a mix of the things I’m thinking of. It’s interesting stuff! And it’s funny to me how easily we can slip into looking at 1991 as something like 1977, this big year zero that somehow marks the start of the modern world, with everything prior to that sounding more like bedrock or history.

I mention this mostly so that, if I never get around to making that mix and anyone is particularly interested in hearing it, they can bug me later.

I joined a club.

Every year, I get very excited about reading Slate’s Music Club, in which some of my favorite critics bounce letters back and forth about the past twelve months. This year I’m slightly nervous instead, because I’ve been asked to join them. Starting this morning, you can follow along as I try my best to keep up with Ann Powers, Jonah Weiner, Jody Rosen, and Carl Wilson — the first entry, from Jody, is up right here. If you’ve never followed the Music Club before, I really do recommend it: A lot of that year-end music talk gets much more enlightening when critics can have a dialogue about it, and trade impressions back and forth.

i am confused by certain descriptions of Destroyer’s “Kaputt”

tomewing:

This makes a lot of sense - that the reason I felt frustrated by my inability to detect the “strata of semiotic meaning” is because it doesn’t exist and the people talking the album up in that way are basically wrong.

Which leaves… what? Well, the references to Stereolab, Yo La Tengo, and the Aluminium Group help clear things up as well, in that I’m not fond of any of those bands either (a couple of Stereolab singles aside). So I can with a clear conscience file Destroyer in that category: groups who are intelligent, thoughtful, admirable builders of rich, unique sound-worlds, and whose albums I intend never to hear again in my life if I can possibly help it.

Yeah, pretty much! Although I feel like I should register that one reason I’m captivated by Kaputt — despite no longer getting a ton from some of the other bands discussed — is that there’s something brittle, frigid, and sour about it. A lot of the 90s acts I have in mind wound up making moony comfort records, or kitschy little daydreams (like, say, the High Llamas); they’d be imaginative spaces to get lost in, but one of the main emotional responses to them was just to think “awww, this is so nice.” One thing that pulls Kaputt out of that realm is that it has a lot more spine, and feelings of its own, some of which are a bit desperate, bitter, or frustrated. The best things I’ve read about it are the takes that skip over this stuff about whether soft-rock sounds are “uncool” and dig into those feelings. (Or the ways Bejar uses soft-rock sounds to get at them — to create a sense of weariness, emptiness, or even paralysis. They also help him be kind of high-handed and imperious, which he is sort of charming at! In that sense, it’s more Leonard Cohen than 90s dreamers.)

reblogged from tomewing

i am confused by certain descriptions of Destroyer’s “Kaputt”

tomewing:

My sense with Kaputt is that it doesn’t travel particularly well: at least some of its power relies on a particular past, and on that past having particular overtones, and if that’s not so familiar or resonant it doesn’t work quite as well. Like, I didn’t listen to sax-y soft rock in the 80s but I didn’t NOT listen to it, it isn’t something which could ever code as horrible or transgressive to me, so when I listen to Kaputt I feel there’s a whole strata of semiotic meaning I’m just not able to detect first-hand.

Plus I can’t stand his voice.

I love Kaputt, but I’ve spent the year being a little confused by the sales pitch that’s under discussion here — the one where the album is a “transgressive” reclamation of dangerously “uncool” sounds. It seems to me that indie acts have been doing that sort of thing more or less continuously for years and years. Since the early 90s, at the very least. To an extent that it’s become more of a staple — an ordinary approach — than any kind of clever or notable move.

Maybe it’s just that the process works too well — so well it becomes invisible, and is left forgotten. In the mid-90s, a lot of artists were making upscale, cerebral records from the scraps of 60s easy listening, and giving lengthy interviews about their appreciation for lounge music, exotica, bossa nova, Martin Denny and Esquivel and old Moog records — all things rock fans might have seen as used-bin kitsch and tittered suspiciously over. (The most visible example of this habit would obviously be Stereolab, but it was a lot more pronounced in some of their peers.) Or maybe you’ve enjoyed the sound of Yo La Tengo over the past 15 years — a sound that firmed up, later in the 90s, when they were seen as digging through potentially “uncool” influences like soft rock, wimpy folk, “lounge” music, and Burt Bacharach samples. Maybe you’ve enjoyed Air, portions of whose first album sounded like the theme from Taxi. There were acts that got well into the 80s, too; a Chicago project called the Aluminum Group made a handful of tracks that aren’t far from Kaputt.

This approach isn’t some forgotten anomaly — some of those groups are still extremely popular. But not much of what they’ve done sounds “transgressive” today. To be honest, it didn’t sound transgressive at the time — not for more than one listen, and mostly because the music press would tell you a lot about the playful influences involved. (Playful, whimsical; not transgressive.) Those types of albums sounded the way Kaputt sounds to me — like somewhat cerebral, mellow, artful records that are interested in plumbing a few specific moods, and are picking through a less-trafficked corner of our collective mental used-record bin to get at them.

I.e., moony records. It’s no coincidence that a lot of these “uncool” reclamations involve picking up on eras marked by really lavish, hi-fi studio productions — that’s exactly the kind of thing that passes temporarily into seeming like schmaltz (which means: gooey, melty, spreadable fat), then looks once again like a world of sonic possibility. Of course it’s a staple approach for heady, day-dreamy records.

Maybe that approach has dropped off enough that people have forgotten about it entirely. Maybe it helps that my life is timed out how it is — some of the sounds on Kaputt are the ones I’d have heard everywhere when I was too young to hear them as anything but ordinary music. It definitely helps that Kaputt is not nearly as “transgressive” as people claim — I don’t hear any interest on Bejar’s part in making an over-the-top pastiche of these sounds. What I’m especially sure of is that trangression is a big red herring here. Consider: There was a time when indie-rock bands bowing to Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys was considered slightly cheeky and uncool — exactly the kind of gooey studio daydreaming we’re talking about. That notion went through the wood chipper so long ago you would never guess it had ever been whole. And if you look back at the records that helped make that happen, it tends to be pretty clear which ones were running on a cheekiness or kitsch, and which ones were actually making something of it. Kaputt sounds to me like it’s entirely in the latter category.

(NOTE: Tom’s surely right that certain associations probably aid in enjoying the album — about the same way Boards of Canada probably sounded more interesting if you’d had to watch a bunch of warped old science filmstrips in second grade. Though I feel like a lot of the sounds on Kaputt lingered around long enough that they shouldn’t be too specific.)

reblogged from tomewing

Anonymous asked: where are you from?

SOLYNDA

obligatory but fun

I put together a Spotify playlist of 50 songs/artists* I enjoyed this year, which — if you’re interested — you can get to via this Vulture post.

* By “artists” I basically mean there are lots of tracks from people whose albums I liked, as opposed to just 50 hot singles full-stop. Rubrics!