Romance is Boring

Well, let’s see if the soft spot in my heart for Los Campesinos! (the Welsh band with the Spanish name) has grown any since they dominated my 2008 with not one but two totally awesome albums.

Nope.

The soft spot is about the same size that it used to be, which is still reasonably large-ish. The new Los Campesinos! record, Romance is Boring (I disagree with the assertion, but that’s a great title nonetheless), is probably my first big Expectations Test of 2010 (it will be followed shortly by second albums from both She & Him and Titus Andronicus). Their first album, Hold On Now, Youngster, made me pretty giddy, with its acerbic lyrics and bouncy, twee-pop music (I personally wouldn’t call it that, but a friend of mine used it to deride the band not long ago and I’m stealing his words because I confess I’ve never known what people meant by “twee”. My friend went on to compare Los Campesinos! to the Go! Team [on exclamation points alone, he's got a point] in a way that suggests he has about as much regard for both bands as he would have for a grilled shit sandwich with a side order of deep-fried herpes). Of course, it caught me in the early part of 2008, when I was feeling like I didn’t have much besides a Hold Steady album (Stay Positive, which turned out to be the best album of that year) to look forward to.

So what, exactly, is the trouble here? Romance is Boring isn’t bad. It’s certainly not boring. It’s got the clever lyrics (so far, my favorite is “we need more post-coital/ and less post-rock”, a sentiment with which I heartily concur, “post-rock” being right up there with “twee” on the list of Bullshit Styles that I Think Pitchfork Made Up), the music is actually better (more guitars, fewer chimey bits) than in the past. And yet…

And yet…

Well, I’m kinda stunned that I don’t like this album more than I do. And don’t get me wrong (or do), I do like it. It’s just… hmm… Here: have you ever had a friend talk up a favorite dessert or something – say, tiramisu – and they take you to this place where they think the world’s best ever, you’d-kill-your-mom-for-a-slice, perfect tiramisu is made and you try the tiramisu and it’s got all the essential elements (for you non-culinary types, any good tiramisu has, in my estimation, two essential elements: coffee and rum), but it just doesn’t quite deliver for you the transcendent, orgasmo-religious (how’s that for a made-up word, Pitchfork? I can do this shit too) experience that it clearly does for your friend? Well, replace your friend with “me”, yourself with “also me” and the tiramisu with Romance is Boring. I think I’ve reached a point where I no longer believe my own rhapsodizing about how fucking awesome Los Campesinos! are. This probably won’t create a problem for other listeners of their music, but it’s kinda bumming me out.

To prove that I was still inexplicably ga-ga over Los Campesinos!, I revisited their debut. Hold On Now, Youngster is still awesome, but I’m now skeptical that I would list it among my favorite albums of 2008. It’s still good, but it doesn’t grab me the way it used to. Fearing the onset of some kind of complete desensitization to great music, I decided to test myself on another band, Titus Andronicus. I was pretty awestruck by their debut, The Airing of Grievances. In anticipation of their second album, The Monitor (which is coming out next month and which can’t come out soon enough for me), I listened to Grievances again. Funny thing: I probably love The Airing of Grievances more now than I ever have. It’s a great album, still one of the more cathartic records I’ve ever heard (when you feel like beating the shit out of the whole world, put on “Joset of Nazareth’s Blues” and “Titus Andronicus” and you’ll feel better in no time. Or at least you’ll have an invigorating soundtrack for that steep climb up the book depository stairs).

So what’s changed between me and Los Campesinos!? Was I so eager for Romance is Boring that I ruined it with my own admittedly high expectations? No. I think it is exactly as good as I expected it to be. Los Campesinos! are doing what they do best, and they’re doing it pretty well. I think I’m just less excited by what they do best than I used to be. Now, bear in mind that I’ve only had this album for a couple of weeks and I could be orgasming over it by year’s end, but I don’t feel that way now. I felt sort of obligated to listen to Romance is Boring and that’s never a good sign. Having fulfilled the obligation, I don’t regret anything, but I do feel like I was just going through the motions a little (yes, I realize I’m dangerously close to a “faking it” analogy). 2010 is a weird year so far – there’s stuff I’ve been sure I would hate that has blown my mind and stuff I’ve expected to blow my mind that has been… well, so far, merely adequate. That I haven’t been utterly disappointed by anything yet is actually a rare and encouraging sign.

At the end of the day, I think the problem I have with Romance is Boring is that I expected it to blow my mind and it didn’t. It was merely good, possibly even great (maybe. Nah, probably not), but entirely unsurprising. I’m not gonna sell the album back or anything and I’ll probably keep listening to it, but I feel like I might end up feeling like I’m in love with an image of this album that exists only in my mind. In which case, I guess I will have proven that my romance with Los Campesinos! has become boring, at which point I will wait until they are dying of cancer to cheat on them. (Too soon?)

See Mystery Lights and Orgy Taxonomists

Ah, Oregon. Land from whence I came, land to which I’ll one day return. Land now known for LeGarrette Blount punchin’ a dude at the Boise State game. Oregon really is a lot classier than that, I promise (Bob Packwood, Tonya Harding, Everclear, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, and Bill Sizemore notwithstanding). Bruce Campbell has a summer home there! Also, there’s great music in the Beaver State  (I’ve mentioned this before) and I’m apparently not the only one who thinks so. James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem. At the risk of sounding like a hipster, you really should listen to LCD Soundsystem. At least give “Daft Punk is Playing at My House”, “North American Scum,” and “All My Friends” a chance. Oh, and “Disco Infiltrator”, “The Great Release,” and “Get Innocuous.” Oh hell, just get both their albums. It’s only 18 tracks.) apparently dug YACHT’s “Summer Song” (they recorded it as an homage to his LCD-ness) so much that he signed them right up to his DFA label. He can do that because he’s James Murphy. Who the fuck are you?

The reason I mention LCD Soundsystem a lot on this here blog of mine is because they do something almost no one I can think of does: they make electronic music that doesn’t send me flying into a homicidal rage. In fact, they make electronic music that kicks ass. That has to be a fluke, right? (No, because Massive Attack and The Beta Band also used to do it.)

Apparently not (I don’t pay attention to my own excessive parenthetical statements). You see, this YACHT album, See Mystery Lights, is pretty great. And it’s definitely of the electronic persuasion. I definitely begrudge them the all-caps name (although maybe I shouldn’t; DOOM does this and his music is unbelievably rad. Your favorite rapper probably doesn’t sample Bukowski poems) and “I’m in Love with a Ripper” is kind of a big turd of a song (not everyone will agree with me there, but the annoying vocal effects are too much for my limited electronic tastes), but the rest of the album ranges from good to fucking awesome, and it starts firmly in the latter category with “Ring the Bell” and “The Afterlife,” two songs that ought to be on the playlist at the hedonistic orgy (is there some other kind of orgy?) that I expect to follow my funeral (if any of you out there live longer than I do, and someone probably will, you must know that any worthy celebration of my life will require epic quantities of  the following:  great beer, great music, and great sex. Probably also video games and swears).

YACHT is pretty much Astoria-born Jona Bechtolt who, in addition to making great music, joins The Goonies as one of only two culturally relevant things to ever emerge from Astoria (their high school mascot is, I shit you not, is the Fighting Fisherman. I’m pretty sure my first alcoholic step-dad could have run onto the field at any given game and been mistaken for this mascot). Bechtolt’s partner in crime on See Mystery Lights is Claire L. Evans, who delivers great vocal turns on “The Afterlife” and “Psychic City,” the catchiest song I’ve heard in a long-ass time. The rest of the band might well be a drum-machine and a laptop. You might think I’m dissing YACHT here, but I’m really not; they do a lot with their lappy & drumputer. A lot more than a lot of really shitty bands out there.

See Mystery Lights is far from perfect; it’s really only 8 tracks with two alternate takes of other songs stuck on the end (the “party mix” of “I’m in Love with a Ripper” is actually superior to the original version, in my opinion. But just barely), which makes it as long as Modest Mouse’s dead-awesome No One’s First and You’re Next EP. That, however, is about par for the course on DFA – LCD Soundsystem has yet to release an album longer than nine tracks. See Mystery Lights has one other minor flaw: “It’s Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want” is about three minutes too long. I forgive YACHT for this, however, because it’s still pretty awesome (especially the “It’s Boring” part). And the gems on See Mystery Lights outweigh its flaws by one million shiny tons.  This style of music may be a bit outside of some people’s comfort zone (hell, it’s out of mine), but it’s the kind of album you’ll hear in the background at a party (or an orgy of the hedonistic or non-hedonistic variety) and start nodding your head. And then you’ll run over to the host of the party/orgy (aren’t orgies a kind of party? And if not, shouldn’t they be? I need an orgy taxonomist, forthwith!) and demand to know what that great music is. And the host will be James Murphy and he’ll tell you it’s this band he just signed called YACHT. And then you’ll wake up. The dream will fade, but See Mystery Lights will still be awesome and James Murphy will still be an all-high musical badass.

I Like Fever Ray. I Don’t Like Fever Ray.

The internet is a harsh mistress. She’s a place where nerds have an inherent upper hand over the masses, often displayed through sophomoric disses spelled with some kind of jumble of letters and numbers (someone told me once that this is called “Leet” or “L33t” or some fucking thing. I don’t care if I misnamed it here. Do you hear me, nerds? I…don’t…care.) . Of course, I myself am a nerd of at least one or two varieties, which brings me to my next point – the internet is a breeding ground for several different types of nerd, some of whom fancy themselves less nerdy than the rest. This can be particularly true of music critics and other cultural cognoscenti, who think that because they’ve never felt the awesome power of confirming a critical hit with a twenty-sided die they’re some how better than the rest of us. Well, they’re not. (And don’t knock D&D until you’ve tried it – you can be just as stuck in the basement sans girlfriend with dice and dry-erase dungeon maps as you can with Fassbinder and Duras films or My Bloody Valentine records.  In fact, I don’t want to make any generalizations here but it’s a scientific fact that people who listen to My Bloody Valentine never ever get laid. Ever)

I bring this up because there is a tendency among internet nerds to get a little smug; we may, on occasion, try to make you feel stupid for not liking the things we like. And then we’ll be mad if too many people start to like the things we like. Readers of Pitchfork.com know what I’m getting at here. They seem to like a band until said band reaches a wider audience (admit it, P-forkers: you don’t like it when fratties listen to the same shit you do) at which point the collective Pitchfork nose is turned up, emitting a tiny snort of disregard for the band’s new work (am I referring to Evil Urges? Yeah, probably), and the review will accuse them of 1) trying to reach the Starbucks crowd (as if nobody at Pitchfork has ever tasted a marble mocha macchiato before) and/or 2) trafficking in “dad rock” or some other perjorative term aimed at older people, teenagers, or non-pitchforkers. Then they’ll go to someplace (say, San Diego) and dig up some cadre of unlistenable douchebags with too many pedals and a laptop (say, Wavves) who they’ll then trumpet as orgasmically awesome. It’s almost like some perverse defense mechanism where the sniveling indie kids get mad when someone else starts to dig the same stuff they do so they either denounce it entirely or snatch it back with a Golemesque, “you cannot has!” For the record, I’m not accusing Pitchfork of not really liking the things they like. I’m just saying they can be smug twats sometimes, like when Ian Cohen (perhaps their biggest perpetrator of smug douchebaggery) suggested that the reason lots of dudes took in Ida Maria’s set at Coachella was because she nearly came out of her dress at one point and sang a song called “I Like You So Much Better when You’re Naked”. For Mr. Cohen, apparently, it is impossible that the men at Coachella might genuinely have liked Ida Maria’s music (that song is ridiculously catchy); no, for Cohen, we were all their to get boners and nothing more. To sum up, as much as is possible (it’s impossible), the Internet breeds self-anointed tastemakers, anonymous name-callers, and an entire ocean of verbally retarded haters. Also porn.

Which brings me (well, not really, but what the hell? We’re almost five hundred words in here and we’ve gotta talk about Fever Ray sooner or later) to Fever Ray, the solo album from The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson. I never listened to The Knife, in part (I admit) because the critical jizz heaped upon them scared me right off of ‘em. Fever Ray, Andersson’s sort of eponymous album, has, if nothing else, convinced me to give The Knife a try.

Fever Ray, if you didn’t guess it by the long preamble, got a lot of positive press (from Pitchfork and others) and, in an effort to overcome my instant skepticism of high critical praise, I decided to pick up Fever Ray and see what all the fuss was all about. And, while I don’t agree with all the kudos lavished upon this album, I can definitely see the point.

A funny thing happened to me today as I prepared to write this review. I’ve had Fever Ray for months and I’ve listened to it all the way through about five times and I was all set to sit down here and shrug my shoulders and say that Fever Ray is no big deal, no need to get excited, et cetera. So then I put the album on, as is my wont when writing about and album. “If I Had a Heart” still doesn’t impress me, but “Dry and Dusty” still does. A lot. I know I’m not going to listen to this album again after this review, but I also know that there are things that you could like about it, if you liked that sort of thing. So Fever Ray is a not-bad album that I don’t like. It may even be a good album that I don’t like. If you like Portishead, but wish they’d slow down and fuck with their voices more, Fever Ray is probably your bag.

Andersson’s voice is certainly versatile, I think. It’s often buried under all manner of digital manipulation, but it’s a lot more compelling than listening to Kanye West teabag Autotune for an hour. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of electronic music (I listen to Massive Attack’s Mezzanine with some regularity, Portishead here and there, and LCD Soundsystem a lot. This is the problem – I compare all electronic music to LCD Soundsystem and James Murphy has so thoroughly bested the competition that he is, for me, to his respective genre what Guinness is to other beers. I imbibe and enjoy other beers, but Guinness is a thing unto itself. It’s practically an event.), so maybe I just don’t get Fever Ray.

But that’s kinda bullshit, isn’t it? I mean, if you really don’t get some piece of music and you’re willing to cop to it, hey, good for you, but I’m not jumping on that bandwagon. Pitchfork used the phrase “committed listens” to suggest that Fever Ray will hit your sonic g-spot if only you want it bad enough. Well, a shit sandwich is still going to taste like shit, no matter how many times you eat it. Committing to it isn’t gonna change a damn thing. I try, and hopefully I succeed, to suggest that, when I’ve enjoyed an album after a few rotations that it’s just a personal thing. I’m not saying you should work extra hard to like an album at all. Certain people are willing to work harder to enjoy an album than others and you’re not better or worse for it. I took the time to like Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica (okay, it wasn’t that hard – that album is awesome) but I don’t expect someone else to sit through it, say, seven times and argue with themselves until they’re convinced it’s good. I’ve worked as hard as I’m gonna to like Fever Ray and I still kinda like it and kinda don’t. It’s not that I don’t understand it – it causes me no puzzlement whatsoever. It’s simply that I like some of it and don’t like some of it, probably most of it. Anytime I’m trying to write a review of an album and I’m not intersested enough to talk about the album or the artist or really anything at all, that’s a bad sign.

On balance, I sense that people who really like mirky electronic music will like Fever Ray and think I’m ludicrous for not heaping more praise upon it, but I’ll think they’re all nuts for not like Trout Mask Replica and we’ll call it day. Unless they do like Trout Mask Replica, in which case, maybe I really do have a problem committing to Fever Ray. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go renew my vows to The Hold Steady.