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spinning towards the moonlight: a Shilmafone mix for the teeming massesMar 24 '04 (Updated Mar 26 '04) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line A pop-industrial yodeling choir, with piano and horns and gratitude. Recommended.
Back over Christmas break, I reviewed the weirder of two CD’s that our own music guru Mike Schiller had been kind enough to trade to me. The idea was that, since he’d sent the albums at the same time, I would review them at roughly the same time. We can all agree that, by archaeological standards, this is what I did. This here mix was his “accessible” mix. Accessible to whom, you might ask, but I can confidently answer: “accessible even to some people who are _not_ deranged killer robots”. From such definitions is contrast born, and with it, excellent mix CD’s. 1. Pop Will Eat Itself, “Not Now James, We’re Busy” I’d sorta dismissed PWEI as the slacker version of Jesus Jones, using mildly amusing humor to disguise their lack of thought and tunes. It turns out that yes, they are, except what the heck’s wrong with that? The samplers chatter madly, the bass guitar pretends it’s in a metal band, some drums shuffle jauntily while others thud, and the rap is demented and happy. I picked up the album, whose title This is the Day, This is the Hour, This is This! guaranteed either portentiousness or a ridiculous lark. It ain’t portentious. 4/5 2. Angry Salad, “Did I Hurt You?” The rhythm guitarist thinks he’s the Edge circa the Joshua Tree. The bassist thinks he’s Simon Gallup from the Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me phase. The lead guitarist likes his power chords, but they’re produced into big, glowing harmlessness: compare him to the Cult’s Billy Duffy and we have a glowing slice of 1987, complete with an earnest male singer straining to fill imaginary stadiums. Angry Salad actually made this album in 1999, so let’s pretend we’re in that new movie Goodbye Lenin and do everything possible to keep them from realizing they’ve been a 12-year coma. Communism is still being reformed, poor schoolkids are still guaranteed their free RDA of ketchup, and “overproduction” is still an inexplicable nonsense word: bliss. 4/5 3. Recoil, “Drifting” My early favorite from this disc. Quietly strained female vocals worm their way through an ominous simmer of timpani, marimba, drum machine, spy-movie horns, and ghostly distorted speech. I suppose it’s probably “trip-hop”, that weird dance genre named for schoolboy clumsiness; but there’s traces of Peter Gabriel’s 3rd album and Thomas Dolby’s the Flat Earth, and the effect is intense concentration, not drama-queen depression. 5/5 4. Soul Coughing, “Soft Serve” When I took a modern dance course in 1998 – a marvelous course that didn’t teach me any steps, but did teach me the bodily self-confidence to go out and look like a moron without steps – the very cute teacher was addicted to Soul Coughing’s music and played some at most sessions. Which means I heard “Soft Serve” lots of times: but never as a _listener_ (and if you think dance doesn’t discourage listening as a general rule, then it’s your turn to explain 99% of the world’s dance remixes). Syncopated drums, little rolling piano chords, lazy-day vocals from a white guy who can’t decide between reggae or beat-poet affectations so he enjoys both. Very pleasant, as the album (Irresistable Bliss) also turns out to be. 4/5 5. Spiralmouth, “Even Though” The first minute is pure-voiced a capella harmonizing, and I can’t prove that it doesn’t sound like the Backstreet Boys – but the singing voices are deep, the words are adequate, and the melodies are rich. Drums enter with a sprightly, high-diving “Yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah” melody that sounds vaguely African (says he who can’t tell you anything inauthentic about Graceland), and I believe all the rest of the “instruments”, including the rather funky electric bass, are in fact human voices. The lyrics are yearning, questing, but the soprano/alto singers ain’t letting that bring them down for a moment. 5/5 6. Yolk, “Into the Unknown” Fierce, squawking guitar carries the main riff: someone in Yolk figures it’s his job to fill in for Jimi Hendrix, even as the rhythm section longs for Booker T. and the MG’s. But Shilmafone reminds us here how fond he is of horn sections, whether they’re co-operating with the tune or, for a few seconds in the bridge, taking over and skipping back a couple of centuries. I like horn sections and Hendrix too; I just usually forget, in my album collecting, to prove it. 4/5 7. Radiohead, “Trans-Atlantic Drawl” A B-side from “Pyramid Song”. If anyone was young and naïve enough to assume Radiohead always went for pianos and mournful, gothic beauty, here was one way for them to learn better. The first half of the song sets Yorke’s distorted screech and a frantically overdriven horn section over glam-rock that’s been bleached in the sun, then charcoaled in a failed attempt to return its color. The second half is synthetic, droney meditation soundtrack. We know they’re the same song because they have the same title: works for me. 4/5 8. Tori Amos, “Frog on My Toe” One of her gentle piano miniatures: pretty and breathy music to make the audience hush and lean forward. Nothing special by Tori standards, but nice. 3/5 9. Tricky, “Contradictive” Tricky’s own vocals are growly, and the laid-back music sounds like a computer-hipster remix of a jugband. Some call-and-response melodies remind me of U2, as heard from the next room. 3/5 10. U2, “Night and Day (Steel String Remix)” Which I say as someone who thinks U2 was a frequently great band, up through (and peaking at) Achtung Baby!. Starting with Zooropa, I’ve often found them passionless and dull; not that passionless has to mean dull, by any means, but with Bono it seems to work that way. The remix hardly helps, placing the song as incidental decoration to a latticework of sequencer noises. I know that a fast base of 16th notes, like a propeller trimming hedges, ought to give it energy, but what I hear is a computer with Parkinson’s disease. Honestly, this remix is better than most: a reasonable amount of stuff happens over the course of its seven minutes. It’s just not, to me, interesting stuff. 2/5 11. Beck, “Supergolden (Sunchild)” I had to check All-Music Guide before I believed that Mike hadn’t messed up and put an early Ween track here. It’s that ramshackle, and Beck has the Ween tenor vibrato harmonies (and the lyrics about mangoes) down pat. I really like how the acoustic guitar is miked, so we hear the decay of every individual string, some of which sound more decayed than others; the yodeling is a harder taste to acquire, but that’s cool too. 3/5 12. Ben Folds Five, “Air” This is one of Folds’s heartfelt songs, where the Elton John influence is easy to believe. There’s a skittering synthesizer effect on the chorus that the Flaming Lips would enjoy, and thick autoharmonies, and distant industrial drums for a dramatic bridge. Quite excellent, and not shunted off to an EP for any obvious reason. 4/5 13. David Bowie, “Bring Me the Disco King (Loner Mix)” Dramatic bridge, dramatic intro, dramatic verses, dramatic choruses: Bowie’s deep, articulate voice is always suited to sounding serious, but these days it’s a surprise when he also uses it to sing. Soft synthesizer drones and rumbles, somewhat Spanish classical guitar, a string section, slow powerful drums, and oh yes: a melody, from 2003, worthy of when it was 1971 and he wasn’t sure he could get by on stardom alone. I hadn’t forgotten he was great – “Under Pressure” and “Space Oddity” pop up too often, and Labyrinth is one of my favorite movies – but I’d assumed “was” was the key concept. 5/5 14. Buffalo Chips, “ 72 Hour Daze” Mike Schiller’s ego trip: this is his old a capella group, and I’d be gentle on him if I had to. Instead I can lavish the Chips with honest praise. The lead vocal melody has the sturdiness of old Brill Building manufactured pop but five times the ambition; the drum machine is bolstered by sung counter-rhythms of “shimmy-bop”s and “doobie-do-bop”s that can’t imagine why you’d laugh at them, so there’s no temptation to do so. Gorgeous stuff. The first musical group I ever loved, the folk Chad Mitchell Trio, did loads of a capella; my still-favorite hit single, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, peaks with dozens of Freddie Mercuries twirling without accompaniment; my favorite piece of classical music is a choral work, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. When is it going to occur to me that I could actually buy my own a capella music? Or, alternately, when can I trade mixes with Mike again? 5/5 15. Gorillaz, “Ghost Train” Blur’s Damon Albarn used to obsess over how clever he thought he was, and he made shallow imitations of thirty years of Britpop stylings. Then he got into sound textures and rhythms, and since then I’ve liked him. Gorillaz seemed unmelodic in their singles; but this has all the melody it needs for its work-song feel, the rhythm section chugs and blurts, there’s really fast tuned drums in the background, and the song just _moves_. It’s snappy, catchy, and I really like the 6-note repeated melody that seems to be made by hitting a tuned jungle-gym with a vibrator. 4/5 16. Martin Gore, “Lost in the Stars” Pre-rock moonlit piano balladry. Um… okay, sure. Your own personal Disney. 2/5 17. Smashing Pumpkins, “Dreaming” Putting this harmless trifle on the Best of Blondie always seemed wrong to me, and I don't think hearing the click track improves it much. But the wobbly synthesizers might, the drifting feel probably does, and Billy Corgan’s obvious love for the material is the clincher. 4/5 18. Flaming Lips, “Thank You, Jack White, for the Fiber-Optic Jesus That You Gave Me” A country song in which Wayne Coyne thanks Jack White for the fiber-optic Jesus that Jack gave him. Affectionate, gracious, with some nice pedal-steel licks: a thoroughly nice way to end a CD. 4/5, and my own thanks to Mike, for his earnestly skewed effort to find pop’s mainstream. “Thank You, Jack White” is nothing that would have played on Continous Country Classics the summer I had that maintenance job with no radio control; but that was thirteen years ago. Maybe everyone’s wiser and kinder now. Let’s jam the request lines, and find out. *********** (The curious may also find Mike's reviews of the mixes I designed for him: one weird, and one user-friendly pop.)  |
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