Post Post – Meta Meta EP

Post Post
Meta Meta EP
Awkwardcore Records

I want to start this review off in a sort of stupid direction. I don’t want to begin with some dissection of this band’s style, musical ability, message, or anything like that. I don’t want to rattle off reference points and mark off what scene they belong to and who should listen to this. I want to open this thing with something relatively superficial. I want to talk about signifiers… about names.

At first blush, Post Post just struck me as “clever,” you know? Generic indie rock wordplay, minor intellectual fronting with a liberal arts sense of humor… the usual thing. Normally, I guess I’d stop paying attention at this point. Most of the time, band names are little more than the least stupid thing the group could agree on when they started playing shows. They’re usually kind of throwaway, a put-on, without much relationship to the actual music (cough… I’m looking at you, Dismemberment Plan). Who the fuck cares about a name?

This is usually a sane way to approach things, but as I got into Post Post and grew to love the music that they make, their name kept coming back to me. It’s almost like I’d made up a story about these two words, a story that helps me understand and position this band in a context that’s bigger than the usual “sounds-like,” “looks-like” fodder that most record reviews are built on. As crazy as it may sound, in this story, the words “Post Post” take on the weight of almost perfectly summing up the moment that I hope we’re moving into right now musically, culturally, and politically. In this story, “Post Post” is what it means to grow up out of post-modern nothingness, and to become something new, meaningful, and beautiful. “Post Post” is to move past the recent fad of declaring history to be over, of declaring that the forces, struggles, and positions that defined our old historical progression have magically evaporated or become too unfashionable to take seriously… that the contradictions that once burned bright and hot in our lives and in our social reality have been finally resolved. And artistically, it means a renewal of the premise that art can serve as a means of honest expression that takes sides, provokes, reveals truths, and creates strength through an acknowledgment of vulnerability.

To give context for this idea, once upon a time folks risked their lives and their material comfort fighting for justice, freedom, control over their work, and liberation along lines of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class. Behind the scenes, the state brutally repressed those movements, killed a few folks, bought off a few more, and put most everybody else in jail. Commentators, corporations, and all the people in power took the moment of relative quiet to announce that the slate had been wiped clean, that the benevolent few at the top had voluntarily transcended the blood and bad manners of the past. The world had supposedly blossomed into a utopia of “post-racial,” “post-feminist” social harmony. Whatever narratives survived about the past struggles were cleaned up and turned into inspirational bedtime stories. The activists and revolutionaries left standing found themselves reduced to cartoon characters in the popular imagination… curiosities at best. Whatever problems remained in this new order could only be accounted for through the failings of individuals and a few constantly redefined “bad elements.” This mirage of social peace was sold to us at a heavy cost: we had the same problems, but now we had only ourselves to blame. The songwriter David Bazan hit the full depth of this deception when he sung the lines “the class war is over / and everyone wins” in a song that was ultimately about suicide. This is roughly how they drowned history.

As a suburban punk coming up in the late 1990s, I stood in the wake of this transformation… the heyday of the post-modern condition. The same systemic forces that were erasing memories of resistance and committing genocide in urban ghettos were producing alienation and psychological dysfunction on my relatively privileged side of the class lines. On a cultural level, this translated into the full-blown retreat of the broader alternative (aka “indie”) music scene from functioning as a real site of resistance. Though the scenes I was a part of were filled with kids like me—full of pain, social anxiety, and desperately looking for connection and a different life—the spaces I found myself in weren’t centered around liberation or even bringing people together to gain strength from shared experience. What pervaded the scene at that time was estrangement on the deepest possible levels, a feeling like we not only had to keep space between each other, but publicly we had to put space between ourselves and anything we might feel or believe. We played out the script that we were given: there was nothing wrong, there was nothing that needed to be taken seriously, no causes to be joined, no fights to be waged, this crushing alienation that drew many of us into the scene could be remedied through vapid socializing and cool points.

Irony, that great chicken-shit strategy for making statements the ultimately state nothing, became an essential cultural currency during this period. To admit anything, to even put something serious on your fucking t-shirt was to be vulnerable to ridicule or sideways glances. Except for small tribes of fanatics—anarcho-punks, some straightedge kids, the few emo kids that wanted more from their scene than self-indulgent melodrama, and the riot grrl true-believers that had survived its commodification—it felt like everybody was just hiding in view. Where the punk rock nation once had the symbolic and emotional character of being at total war with society, the 1990s indie rock scene it helped spawn often felt disconnected from a coherent grasp of even personal/emotional struggles. There were places in the scene, places as vast as they were utterly lifeless, where truth had been abandoned in favor of pure artifice. Too much of the art that was coming out of our community was sustained with a core of little more than dumb jokes and fashionable posturing. The outsiders had made outsiders of themselves. Our post-modern rock scene was devouring itself, and as I got older, it only got worse.

In 12-step programs, there’s a notion that change doesn’t come until you first recognize that your life has become unmanageable: that the shit you need, you ain’t getting; the shit you do to fulfill your needs, it ain’t working. On a cultural level, I’d like to think that we’re getting to this point: that those of us that take a conscious approach to engaging this generation’s music scene are beginning to recognize that in order to have art and community that meets our needs and our desires, we have to do things differently. Philly’s Post Post may not be an outwardly conscious band (they’re certainly not as outwardly political as this batshit review I’m writing), but in my view they are doing something differently than a lot of the indie rock bands out there… namely, the songs they write, the music they play, it all feels honest to me. The tracks on Meta Meta are emotionally rich, often heartbreaking, but without self-pity. As lyrics go, lines like “I wish I wasn’t this way” and “I don’t ever want to be sober” are about as straightforward as you can get in expressing what it feels like to hurt. Michelle Zauner’s delivery—belted out in impassioned crescendos—only serves to drive the point home. As beautifully lush as Post Post’s sound is, as gifted as these musicians are, and as much as their music conjures up similarities to well-marketed bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there’s a plainness and a directness here that stands apart from other easy-on-the-ears acts who are more comfortable hiding behind wit and intellect than they are getting up on stage and just communicating who they are and what they feel.

On Meta Meta, there’s a kind of fearlessness and a willingness to stand exposed that is rarely heard from a pop-inflected indie rock group. It’s fearlessness like this that makes me hopeful. The post-modern conditions of our reality taught many us to deride truths, deride the deeper narratives that frame our individual and social lives, and took away many of the ways we had to partially understand and communicate the validity of our experiences with each other. Today, we cannot go back: we cannot rebuild old struggles, rewrite old love songs. But we can evolve. We can find new ways to express meaning, new methods to come together and get what we need. The phrase “Post Post” describes our situation—historically we stand in the aftermath of an aftermath. And it also raises the obvious questions: What do we do now? Where do we go now? To me, the band Post Post implies an answer: we write new love songs, and we go forward.

Post Post’s demo ep, Meta Meta, came out Fall 2009 and is available for download (with donation) or purchase from Awkwardcore Records (http://www.awkwardcore.com). On August 7th, they will be having the release show for their newest ep, Residents, at Kungfu Necktie.

My Mind – Path Masher 7″

My Mind
Path Masher 7″
Badmaster Records

Once upon a time in the land of Philadelphia, there was a band called Eat Forever. Eat Forever played a frenzy of loud, melodic, ADD-fueled pop songs with abrupt endings and surrealistic lyrical undertones.

Back in 2005 or 2006, they played a show in my old house’s tiny basement and afterwards, smitten by their deafening awesomeness, I asked Mr. Tim Westberg from the group if he could give our webzine a promotional copy of one of their releases to review. When I was going to shows back then, this was a frequent question I’d ask musicians. The sane answers that I’d get in reply would usually range somewhere between “Yeah, sure” and “No asshole, you need to fucking pay for that!!!” (Fair enough.) Tim’s response was much more illusive. He made it clear he was excited to have us write up a review of Eat Forever’s music, but at the time Eat Forever didn’t actually have any official releases for us to write about. His solution to this apparent quandary was to make me a fucking crazy, rough-as-shit burned cd of songs they were thinking about using for an ep (as a bonus, he also tossed in a handful of his solo experiments on 3″ cds with full artwork).

I was hardly a stranger to thrown together DIY recordings, but this Eat Forever pseudo-promo was a real kick in the butt. The whole thing was comprised of thirty-six rough mixes of only about seven or eight distinct songs played in a different random order over and over again. Some of them were decently recorded, some were totally fuzzed out or taken straight from from practice recordings. I didn’t even have a track list to help me sort out song titles or anything.

For almost any other band, I feel like this kind of confusing, completely unedited vomiting of raw material would be nearly impossible to sit through, let alone review. For Eat Forever, it strangely worked. The shit was just so catchy, so quick, so energetic, so careening from one idea to the next that it didn’t phase me to listen to a distorted third or forth out-take of the same song I’d heard just a few minutes ago. And since Eat Forever songs were inevitably written to leave you wanting more, the extreme repetition proved to be a really satisfying way to listen to the material. All in all, it was a fine introduction to a fine Philly band.

Flash forward to 2010, and much of what was Eat Forever has morphed into My Mind. Now, instead of finding myself trying to intelligently review a sprawling heap of unfinished proto-songs, I’m faced with Path Masher—a totally together, totally tight, ten minute monster of a 7″ that plays like a fucking LP.

It’s pretty clear on Path Masher that Tim and the rest of the EF holdovers in My Mind haven’t given up their old ways. Just like on the Eat Forever recordings, almost all of the eleven songs on this 7″ are well under the one minute mark. Just like before, all the songs start and stop on a dime, pull you in with sweet melodies, rile you up, and cut out just when you feel like the chorus should cut in. The opening song “Be A Fascist To A Fascist” is even straight up Eat Forever-era material—an updated version of a song that had made it onto the original burned promo they gave me years and years ago.

But as conceptually true as My Mind is to much of the old Eat Forever schtick, Path Masher definitely isn’t a simple regurgitation of old formulas. The most impressive part of this 7″ for me isn’t how much it sounds an old band I used to like, it’s how much they are able to break new ground and take the music to the next level. While Eat Forever was more bound up in the spastic gesticulations of their psyche-pop punk oeuvre, My Mind’s pop stylings are somewhat cleaner and more expansive—on Path Masher they seem more willing to slow things down, making it easier to pick out discernible notes of The Zombies or inflections of old Elephant 6 bands in their brief compositions. Despite their self-imposed limitations around length and pacing, My Mind seems to constantly push the envelope to find new ways to bust out razor sharp song-writing that makes its point in less than sixty seconds flat.

Jam-packed with compellingly innovative tunes, Path Masher is about as full a meal as you’re going to get on a 7″ record. It’s a special thing to come across music that is as provocative as it is catchy, and so I absolutely recommend this release as an entry point into the work of a band making important music here in Philly.

While I believe this 7″ may presently be out of print, you can still check it out via this My Mind-related blogspot. (This site also features most of the Eat Forever discography, some of Tim’s solo projects, and a bunch of other really solid music for your downloading pleasure.)

mischief brew // songs from under the sink

Mischief Brew
Songs from Under the Sink
Fistolo Records

This is the new(est) full-length album from Philadelphia sweetheart Erik Petersen. Erik’s been regaling the city with anarcho-folk-punk anthems for years, and recently (on 2005’s Smash the Windows) acquired a bass, a drum kit, and several amplifiers to back up his tunes. The full band arrangements were vibrant and airy, while still preserving the old acoustic grit, and proved Erik’s musicianship to be several notches above the average sit-and-strummer.

Songs from Under the Sink brings this fuller sound to some of Erik’s oldest tunes. The album is the result of some musical spring cleaning—songs culled from odd comps, dusty tapes, and forgotten demos. Although the result sounds like the junk drawer that it is—don’t expect the flow and tempo of a standard l.p.—the balance among these songs is carefully considered: even as Erik revamps some old favorites, a good number of the tracks here will be unfamiliar to most listeners.

And this, as it turns out, is a good thing. Even those of us who’ve faithfully collected every damn thing that Erik’s put out over the years—from the West Chester demo tapes to the Orphans discography—will find something here to illuminate the more obscure corners of Mischief Brew. We get to hear Erik’s growly hardcore roots on “Tell Me a Story” and live his high school angst in “How Did I Get Out Alive?” There’s even a nice Leadbelly reworking (”Midnight Special 2002″) to round things out at the end.

The new versions of some of the old live staples—”A Rebel’s Romance,” “Dreams of the Morning”—will sound a bit jarring here. Erik seems to have outgrown the need to write wistful ballads, so he’s lifted the spirits of these songs with a good deal of instrumental celebration. The tunes no longer brood—they rollick. Sometimes, it doesn’t quite work; but more often, the arrangements play as a celebration of how far Erik—and his listeners—have come.

the microscopic septet // surrealistic swing

The Microscopic Septet
History of the Micros (Volume Two): Surrealistic Swing
Cuneiform Records

Dear readers: I realize that one of the few real hallmarks of this humble internet-zine we call ARTNOISE is to prattle on almost endlessly about the releases that inspire us, eschewing both the review-factory conventions of mindlessly regurgitating promotional one-sheets and penning reams of uselessly vague paragraph-length reviews. This is one of those elements of craft that we clearly take a significant measure of pride in, and one that we hope makes our occasional lack of new content somewhat more excusable.

Unfortunately, regarding this particular review of The Microscopic Septet’s newest re-release collection History of the Micros (Volume Two): Surrealistic Swing (put out by our phenomenally supportive friends at Cuneiform), I am sadly going to be a bit rushed in my overall appraisal of it. The reason for this is that I wanted to make sure that this review went up prior to the Philadelphia date for The Microscopic Septet’s current US tour… which wouldn’t you know is later tonight, at the World Cafe.

All that said, The Microscopic Septet are a NYC jazz band that was previously active in the 80s, during which time they put out four proper releases—all of which are currently being re-released by Cuneiform, the last two of which are included on Surrealistic Swing. While it should be a well-understood fact that I’m not enough of a jazz-head to offer any definitive commentary about where particular jazz groups might be situated along the genre’s various stylistic axises, I can say that The Micros have a heavy orientation towards brass, wailing reeds, and swing, and that however significant their impact might have been on the broader jazz scene they do at least have the undeniable distinction of having composed the theme music to the Philly-produced NPR radio program “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” (included as the last two tracks on the second disc of this set).

Having listened through Surrealistic Swing a number of times since receiving it, I can definitely say that on the whole, this collection has got me pretty stoked on The Microscopic Septet as a whole. As I’ve hinted at in previous reviews, the jazz records that I tend to gravitate towards are definitely ones that are more closely wedded to what I would call a sense of punk or avant garde aesthetics: records that push established formal boundaries in particularly jarring—even violent—ways, records whose underlying mode of expression is firmly democratic and anti-technical, or records that just fucking explode into twisting fire. In many ways, I don’t think that the Microscopic Septet exactly fits this bill for me (at least through the latter, potentially more polished part of their career that this half of the collection covers). This isn’t Ornette Coleman jazz, Sun Ra jazz, or Flying Luttenbachers jazz: its general orientation is far simpler and more straightforward. Nonetheless, when it comes to my usual knee jerk reactions to the standard, normative sounds of relatively contemporary jazz (that despite its pretensions of “improvisation,” it regurgitates dead musical forms; that it lacks passion or a sense of abandon; that it’s overly trained or academic; that it just fails to hold my interest), I find them largely inapplicable to The Micros whose music is not particularly new to me but is still innovative and generally engaging regardless.

My favorite example of this from Surrealistic Swing occurs with the track “The Dream Detective” off of their last LP Beauty Based on Science (The Visit) (also included on the second disc), a low-key ballad of brass/reed washes with a piercing emotionality that perpetually wavers between the haunting and sentimental, and the smutty and pornographic. The track “In The Mission” off of the band’s Off Beat Glory LP (included on the first disc) also has a similar air of contradicted poignancy to it, oscillating as it does between the solemnity of its core musical themes and a few minor eruptions into hedonistic rumbas and swing-inflected interludes. With triumphs such as these under their belt, it would have been hard for me not to come to appreciate The Microscopic Septet.

If you make it out to the show tonight, please don’t be a stranger!

emilyn brodsky // 9 songs on enjoying the process

Emilyn Brodsky
9 songs on enjoying the process.
self-released

Approximately forever ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Emilyn Brodsky do an opening set at an Erik Petersen show at the Rotunda in Philadelphia. Her performance—which tripped and sputtered in a few fits of half-remembered lyrics and such—was nonetheless charming and absolutely captivating, so much so that I requested one of her demo CDs for review on ARTNOISE. Like so many things that I’ve received during times when I’m otherwise occupied with life, politics, or wage labor, the demo unfortunately sat on my shelf unreviewed until now—despite being one of most the promisingly beautiful home-recorded singer-songwriter demos that I’d heard in a good while.

One of my major regrets with this webzine is the fact that from time to time I find myself unable to give every worthwhile piece of music that comes my way the proper recognition it deserves. While we’ve always reserved the right to only write about releases that we’re passionate about, it’s a dumb thing to not write about good music and to the extent to that I drop the ball on such things I am deeply sorry. Fortunately though, I do have a reasonably good memory for the things that I’ve left outstanding and when something inspires me or stirs my sense of responsibility towards the artists that support this website—such as, in this case, the circumstance of Emilyn Brodsky playing a show at the Fire this upcoming Thursday, November 17th—I’m always willing to step back into gear and belatedly dust off some of the outstanding materials that have been left with me for review.

But at any rate, that is all just a question of my own situation as someone attempting to be a creative person and is tangential to my purpose right now. Brodsky’s demo relates to this story only so far as it is the story behind this delayed review and only so far as such a personal narrative might be an apt beginning to a review of demo that in its own right is bubbling over with personal narrative and inflection.

In many ways, the simplest thing I could say about 9 songs on enjoying the process is that if you enjoy home-recorded music or the confident vulnerability inherent in naked singer-songwriting then you will almost certainly love this recording. Without a doubt, there are certain conventions inherent in this form—a certain lack of polish, a certain directness between the performer and the listener, a certain fragility in sounds that are at once distant and intimately close—and there is no question that this demo more than lives up to what might be expected of it such terms. On the whole, Brodsky’s arrangements are lilting, bare bones constructions—primarily consisting of only her ukulele and the strength/softness of her voice. Her subject matter is somewhat typical yet evocative—commentaries about love, about being, about performance, and about the New York City scene that she inhabits.

Paradoxically though, what really makes this demo CD remarkable to me, might have less to do with its obvious strengths but rather in the few spots where Brodsky’s melodies go off or fail to become fully actualized. The clearest example of this happens on the song “four letters (for molly)” which crams together conflicting melodies and refrains in a crude stream of consciousness. The song is beautiful and contains a great beauty, but at its core it is overabundant: in terms of its structure, it is a mess. This is a criticism to be sure, but behind it there is also a significant compliment.

Beyond any politics or pronouncements about their higher purpose as an oppositional cultural product, home recordings and DIY releases in general offer listeners a direct experience of the creative process that is unlike anything that occurs in more polished or fully-realized artistic works. Even still, as much as I love and respect these mediums of communication and expression, there are also very sharp limitations to what can occur within them. Flaws, missteps, imperfections—though ever present in all things born by human hands—lie fully exposed, occasionally clouding or obscuring the full potential of what an artist might be able to express if, for example, one removed the background hiss from a track or consciously reworked a melody or a refrain. For many artists, this potential for creative expression beyond the limits of what DIY recording can offer might just not exist. For others—such as Brodsky—one can hear the glimmers of a musical voice that might be absolutely transcendent if it were more crafted or labored over more painstakingly. Such potential is a rare gift, and detecting it is the best possible flaw to hear within the grain of a simple DIY recording.

Nonetheless, 9 songs on enjoying the process is exactly what it claims to be: a document of process and not necessarily a realized conclusion. Whether Emilyn Brodsky continues on to create something more definitive and more expressive of the musical abilities she clearly possesses is an open question that remains to be answered. In the meantime though, she has achieved something quite remarkable on this demo as it is without a doubt a poignant snapshot of an artist and her art—containing as much richness and vibrant humanity as such a text can bear.

circles // when the big river floods

Circles
When The Big River Floods
Well Below Records

I think it’s fair to say that barring some great 90s Sub Pop-esque cataclysm in this city’s music scene, Philadelphia rock music is never exactly going to make sense. In the fifteen-twenty block radius that constitutes the “hipper”/whiter parts of West Philadelphia, there might be over a hundred fledgling punk and experimental rock bands forming and playing out of various basements and rehearsal spaces. I would suspect that three-quarters of these bands make music out of boredom or as a joke, half of them will probably never play a show, and only a handful of them will actually get to the point of seriously playing and putting out releases. Nonetheless, out of all the artists that have actually had their shit together enough to eek their way onto my (or anyone else’s) radar, there’s one thing that I think is sometimes really, really striking about our local fare: almost nothing is ever the same.

It’s not exactly fair to say that Philadelphia has no “sound” exactly—the fact that this city has produced two somewhat known, somewhat similar bands like Need New Body and Man Man might hint at a certain local flavor in the work of some of our city’s hipster art-weirdos, and the countless sloppy punk bands here might all sound the same by definition. But beyond a few, almost coincidental points of convergence within the punk/experimental scene here and there, for the most part we are a city of iconoclasts—a single space that somehow contains the slap-stick calliope punk of The Low Budgets, the jolting/daydreaming experimental rock of Make A Rising, and the metal-inflected dance-party of Pony Pants. Rather than a single, clearly defined line, Philadelphia’s music scene is and may forever be a tangled knot of loose threads.

This fact was driven home to me when I was listening to the copy of Circles’ When The Big River Floods that was passed on to me by their singer/guitarist Nick Mellevoi. Circles is yet another interesting twist in Philadelphia rock music that basically takes traditional rock and roll/indie rock singer-songwriting and punctuates it with the looseness and technical proficiency of this city’s homegrown experimental free jazz. As an album When The Big River Floods has a lot going for it, the musical ideas at work in it are generally well-conceived and impeccably executed, Nick’s song-writing consistently holds its own, and the songs are full of instrumental richness and gloriously ecstatic rock moments. Particularly successful in all of these regards is the album’s opening track “Away with the tide,” a song about an apocalyptic flood set against a beautiful mess of down-tempo guitar riffing, drum crashes, and trombones.

In the sheer terms of their ability to place high-concept, heavily-trained music techniques within a totally non-pretentious stylistic frame—one that’s neither afraid to rock or jam the fuck out—what Circles does more than earns my respect. Through their occasional roughness and their honesty of purpose, Circles has born into this world yet another paradoxical archetype of Philadelphia rock music: a band playing riffed-out bar rock for kids that listen to Ornette Coleman. However they’ve managed arrived at this point and however amazing the music they can make is, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever be able follow them.

the cutest puppy in the world // finfolk

The Cutest Puppy In The World
Finfolk
SocketsCDR

While much of my experience of music can be characterized by the bawdy joys and cheap thrills of an unthinking, visceral engagement with noise and energy, on a conceptual level the question of what music is or should be is something that I’ve come to take pretty seriously as of late. For me, all music—indeed, all meaningful artistic creation—should ideally strive towards the expansion of the total content and quality of what it means to be human. Beyond simply representing existing extremes of our collective personalities and psyches, our experience of music and our participation in music should in turn render such extremes more vivid and profound. Rather than simply depicting feelings, music should make us feel more. Rather than simply depicting dreams, music should enable us to dream more and to provide all dreams with a substance and a physicality that throbs, shakes, and rattles our bodies to the fucking floor.

That contemporary pop music falls short of these prerogatives should be relatively obvious given that the total range of allowable human substance it presents is rarely less mediocre than the worst trade-paper romance novels or more evocative than the most straight-forward corner store pornography. None of this should be surprising, of course. Pop music is simply another commodity produced by an industry; its trajectory and boundaries are determined by profit, shifts in stock prices, and any manner of coldly calculated business decisions.

By contrast, the extent to which experimental music falls short of these prerogatives is far more heart-breaking. As a medium that is generally insulated from the even the risk of profitability by virtue of being a comparatively “difficult” kind of music, experimental possesses a unique capacity to carry out music-making without much real concern for the dictates of the marketplace. With the exception of odd groups like Sonic Youth, Boredoms, or Lightning Bolt—groups who have somehow taken their music far enough into public consumption that they are now generally be able to live off the noise they make—experimental artists can largely expect little in terms of recognition and even less in terms of wages. As much as this situation may not benefit the physical survival of artists living under a capitalist economy, the one positive effect of this mess is that it more or less limits the considerations involved in producing art limited to the artistic product itself.

And yet, however great the promise of this situation for an underground music scene whose primary goal is the further realization of humanity itself, the reality has been sadly very different. Experimental art has all too often rejected humanity and organized itself not as a project rooted in the general development of human consciousness on a total scale, but as the joyless playplace of intellectual and fashion elites. Sentimentality, sadness, romance, love, and passion—human things—are all too absent from this art. Rather than looking upon something that represents who we are or who we could be—with all of our hope and our tangles—this art reveals little to us beyond coldly woven structures built in a language of pure specialists, feelingless architects, and fascists. Atonality, dissonance, and all the glorious things that happen when instruments are played incorrectly become in turn manifestations of “sophisticated technique” and “expertise.” All participation and parity between the performer and audience are removed; The Artist alone possesses the talent of meaningful creation, and is thus free to exercise this genius in exchange for appreciation, aggrandizement, and social and cultural status.

As I see it, “high art” is the general plague of experimental music and I can’t help but wonder if anyone who intentionally produces experimental work in such a vein has ever understood artistic creation or ever appreciated the full possibilities that are contained within it. That this mindset is so predominant, that this scene is so overtaken with such devils of self-importance and carefully-maintained elitisms, that so much of the content of experimental music is the denial of such human things as feeling, frailty, and whimsy, constitutes the true failure of this music today. What is fortunate for us is that this failure is by no means total and the groups and artists capable of joining the wide-open stylistic language of experimental music with a human roughness and simplicity—punks, in other words—are without a doubt some of the brightest lights in today’s avant garde.

Now, having never met either of the two individuals that make up the band The Cutest Puppy In The World, I can’t particularly make any real claims about what they see as the meaning behind their music and its relationship to human consciousness, but even still, if their recent CDR release Finfolk is any indication, these kids are exactly the type of punk experimentalists that are capable of combining the coarse, broken sounds of their oeuvre with the warmth and rich simplicity of living, breathing dreams and emotion. Recorded live in Washington DC during the year 2005, the pieces featured on Finfolk are a gloriously unkempt patchwork of repetitions, brutal deconstructions, looping notes, dark grumbles, and carefully orchestrated musical phrases.

Through the twists and turns of their meandering improvisations, The Cutest Puppy conjure forth a musical language that is somehow able to borrow equally from the gritty amp-hum claustrophobia of Labradford-inflected drone, the chaotic ecstasy of pure noise rock, and the mangled, soulful kinetics of free jazz. From this strange vantage point in the nexus of these disparate traditions and vocabularies, The Cutest Puppy manifest pieces of music whose range and depth is nearly as varied and limitless as the imagination itself. On “Sordomutics”—the album’s opener—the band’s musical process leads through a haze of gnarling instrumental whines and pings into a slow-rising lament of bass clarinet and piano; on “OlOld Orcadian” this process leads straight into a frenzy discord and fire; on “Nangen Cuts The Cat In Two” this process brings about sentiment, gentle harmony, and occasional, clattering celebrations.

What fundamentally seems to set The Cutest Puppy so far apart from the larger portion of the experimental scene is that for all their variations and stylistic diversity, they still seem very much concerned with the making of music, with all its robustly humanistic implications. While all the pieces on Finfolk contain their challenging and boldly innovative aspects, the experimentalism that underlies them is a decidedly permissive one in that rather than seeking to gestate some new completed vision of patently artificial or purely conceived sound, The Cutest Puppy allows their pieces to flow together organically, taking in melody and discord in whatever quantities that might instinctively seem to be right. This aspect of the tracks featured on Finfolk is without a doubt one of their most honest characteristics, and combined with the album’s decidedly DIY packaging and the innate realness of its live recording, it produces an air of genuine intimacy between those encountering these tracks and the artists responsible for their creation.

Without knowing more about this band or their intentions, I would wager that Finfolk isn’t particularly intended as any manner of serious insurrection against the establishment of today’s experimental music. Even still, through their unpretentious, wildly humanistic ministrations on this release, The Cutest Puppy In The World does succeed in underscoring some of the impressive potential that experimental music regularly fails to live up to. This record demonstrates in brilliantly unassuming terms that experimental music can not only exist without all its intellectual poses, but can also beat and shake with all the delicate passion and warmth of a heart and a soul.

hi red center // architectural failures

Hi Red Center
Architectural Failures
Pangaea Records

Architectural Failures is the third release from Jonathan Pfeffer’s fledging label Pangaea Records, and the first to feature a band other than Pfeffer’s own. The men of Hi Red Center seem to share some of Pfeffer’s taste for clean, angular guitar lines and prominent instrumentals; the real origins of Hi Red Center’s sound, however, go back a little further. The band’s songwriting—sometimes playful, often chaotic, consistently lo-fi—draws on the quirkiness of bands like Quintron, while the deadpan vocals at times recall Stephin Merritt (or even Devo).

These are, no doubt, great musicians to be compared to, and Hi Red Center handle well the trappings of their chosen genre. They don’t mimic their influences, nor do they loftily “surpass” them; rather, the band keeps their songs low to the ground, never trying too hard, always having fun, letting the music speak for itself. Most of the tracks are short, poppy, dissonant vibraphone-and-drum jam sessions that eschew conventional song structure in favor of creative meandering; “Captain Waltz,” the record’s second track, is a typical example. The instruments are often just slightly out of rhythm with each other, creating an off-kilter feel that ups the quirkiness factor. Sometimes (to my great delight), as on the song “Evildoer,” Ben Lanz will add a layer of atonal trombone to the whole ordeal, making for a great free-jazz-rock vibe that sounds a bit more serious, a bit more legitimately “artsy”—but really, still just having fun.

Occasionally, Hi Red Center verges into longer efforts—say, a four-minute song as opposed to their more typical two-minute bursts of noise. In “Hollow Buttons,” the album’s longest track, the band builds more of an ambient sound, relying on long, sustained arcs to create the song rather than short, spastic explosions. “Hollow Buttons” starts out as merely pleasant, but, as more and more sounds are layered on and a simple melody emerges, the song becomes truly beautiful—one of the few moments on this record that touches the listener on an emotional level.

This is perhaps the only caveat about Hi Red Center; theirs is undeniably a good album—energetic, original, interesting—but most of the songs consciously appeal to music junkies with a weakness for the artsy-quirk thing. There are few moments of real, sincere intensity. The musicians in the band are clearly capable of writing straightforward songs; this isn’t what they want to do, and in truth, it isn’t what I want them to do either. I have a lot of fun listening to Hi Red Center explore their experimental side—but I also think they’re capable of writing heartbreaking songs, and part of me can’t help but wonder what I might be missing.

glissandro 70 // self-titled

Glissandro 70
self-titled
Constellation Records

I tend to think that pop music has a lot more to offer than we give it credit for. Now it’s true that pop can often be stifling and rife with orthodoxies of various shades and types. Yes, it’s true that all the uninspiring, profit-oriented variations of established musical genres employ variations of pop structure as a means to grab listeners and convert mass audience into corporate capital. Whether in the guise of “pop R&B,” “pop hip-hop,” “pop rock,” “pop punk,” or whatever, there’s no question that heavy-handed hooks and choruses are effective impliments in boring products into the minds of potential consumers, just as there’s no question that the over-reliance upon these formal crutches can sap the art and intelligence out of even the most cutting edge material. But despite the abuse that pop has suffered in the behest of corporate interests, the question remains: Just because the devil uses choruses and hooks to hock commodities over the planets’ stolen radio spectrums, does that simple fact forever condemn the pop form to a life of servitude to the capitalist mode of production and consumption?

As difficult as it is to detach the economics from the musical forms (or from anything for that matter), I have to say that I think that it’s dangerous to cede any mode of expression wholly to profit and banality. There are obviously conceptions of music that better lend themselves to assimilation by the system, and pop is certainly one of them. But at the same time, depending on the context or the usage, even pop forms can be employed in ways that are as subversive and brutally humanistic as the best that punk rock has yet aspired to. For example, during the 1970s, bands like Suicide deeply submerged themselves in depraved pop formalisms and in turn used them to reenact firey hell for their audiences—transforming pop repetition into an apocalyptic cacophony and employing Elvis-inflected delivery to promote voilence and mass murder. While properly-termed punk rockers like Vega and Rev reconstructed pop through their own lense of aggression and nihilism, these tenets of experimentalism and subversion can equally be applied to pop music from any number alternate of vantage points—as evidenced by the self-titled debut by Glissandro 70.

If I was pressed about what Glissandro 70’s most meaningful contribution to the field of avant pop was, I would have to say that out of all the experimentalists that I’ve heard that have sought to bring together pop and “high art” instrumentalism, no one really else comes close to them in terms of actually retaining the fun or joyful aspects of the pop sound. While I thoroughly enjoy albums like Fly Pan Am’s N’Ecoutez Pas which meld together melodies and hooks with complex experimental rock, at the end of the day, such works nonetheless place high demands on their listeners to follow and interpret fundamentally difficult music. By constrast, Glissandro 70 is an absolute delight of a record; a collection of extremely thoughtful pieces of music that are as immediately pleasing to the ear as Pinback or Múm.

At the heart of what Glissandro 70 does is a radical reimagination of the way in which hooks and repetition can be employed in music-making. Seizing upon the verse-chorus-verse format, Glissandro 70 removes from sight all elements save for the chorus and destills it into a purer essence to be contorted and flayed ad infinitum over a backdrop of dub-inflected beats or soaring instrumentations. While veering closer to songwriting on tracks such as “Bolan Muppets” and “Portugal Rua Rua,” this process ultimately reduces their catchy and often emotive aray of harmonies and phrasings to little more than a captivating stew of chants and bodily contortions. Far from the usual coldness and alienness of experimental music, this is experimental that feels boldly sentimental and approachable; radical pop music that beats with the warmth of a human heart.

If there’s anything we can learn from music like this, it’s just that for the most part, all methods of artistic creation possess the possibility for self-innovation and for the expression of humanity’s real creative power. Pop music—or moreover the formalisms which define the pop “sound”—are only as oppressive to unrestrained creativity as the context in which they are employed necessitates. As catchy and accessible as their music may be, Glissandro 70’s debut would hardly qualify as a particularly marketable good in that like most true art, it pushes boundaries and seeks to articulate a new vision of sorts. That inclination towards newness of expression, or towards an ever-changing pursuit of indefinable human truth is exactly the sort of perogative that profit-oriented music production tends to obscure. Thus, in the end, perhaps it is not so much a question of form at all but a question of simple intent. What makes “pop” into a prejorative term has little to do with what it sounds like but how it is employed on the level of artistic production. In and of itself, Pop is not the problem—profit is.

reds // is means

Reds
is:means
Waking Records

Okay, so the cover art is a little dramatic. The songs have titles like “The Blind Believe.” The band has clearly listened to a lot of Dischord records. But you know what? In the end, it all comes together to produce a record that straight-up rocks harder than anything I’ve heard in a while.

Reds aren’t necessarily looking to break new ground; they’re not out to create their own genre, or to have their names dropped at the proverbial rock and roll water cooler as the next big thing. This is a band that are sure about what they want to say, how they want to say it, and are good at what they do. They are not weighed down by tortured artistry; the songs have the same meaty texture as Fugazi’s, and they occupy the same space between rock and hardcore. The guitars come on loud and intense, but the tempos are moderate and the production is clear, so we don’t feel overwhelmed. We have time to listen.

And careful listening yields rich rewards with this record, because the lyrics are crucial. They’re not necessarily clever or poetic; rather, they are heartfelt ideas, clearly expressed. The rare instances of poetic language—“these thoughts on the tip of my tongue, like caged birds, wait to be set free”—mark some of the weaker points in the album; vocalist Evan does far better when he simply says what he means. Throughout the record, Reds give us their thoughts on war (bad), communication (important), and hope (crucial). These stark, plaintive expressions again recall early Fugazi, but again, it’s so well done that the resemblance is forgivable.

Is:means is Reds’ debut album, and, as the main qualities of the band so far seem to be general competence and genuine passion, it’s anyone’s guess as to where they will go next. The songs often have a duel quality to them; the sound and delivery is very straightforward, but the structure is more sophisticated, hinting at a band with more ambitious leanings. Often, a rawk-out chorus will be followed by a sudden shift in tone: a haunting, angular breakdown that recalls some of Reds’ labelmates on Waking (think Sinaloa or Stop It!!). Reds also make good use of loud-soft dynamics, often cycling through several moods and tempos within a single song. “Instrumental” (which does in fact have vocals) shows the band at their most abstract; here, they create long arcs of wispy, ambient noise, allowing the music to convey that which even the most straightforward lyrics cannot.

Such moments are powerful, and they create variety in an otherwise uniform set of songs. In the end, though, the appeal of this band lies in their clean lines and straight execution. In a music world that is becoming increasingly bloated with genres and sub-genres, it’s refreshing to hear an album that finds strength in returning to the basics.