The Soods / Ornaments Of Affection

The longer I remain a critic the more I criticize. I would call it a hazard of the job except I am doing this particular element for nothing. It takes a toll on me. The time. The torture of critique. The torment of knowing how easy it is to dismantle in a paragraph what may have taken months for a band to assemble. Knowing how hard it is to create something interesting and worthwhile. It takes a toll on the artists who have to endure the vagaries of my intemperate mood and the narrowing eyelet of my tastes. Sometimes, I zero in on an unwitting release as an exemplar of what I identify to be a wider failing, and ravage it as prey of collateral guilt. I hold the artist's accountable for the daemon object now loose in a landscape of rubble. So, what am I criticizing? Mostly, I hope it is the music as cultural orphan sticky with the mucus of its birthing labor. But this is a fallacy. Because I can't shake off the nice people who send me things in eager anticipation of attention or affection. If it really were the attention economy, my listening closely, reflecting and writing would be enough. But it isn't because this is an economy of approval...of like and its big sister love. And I like and love less than I once did. 

What a wretched preamble for a band like The Soods to wade through. The attention was sought. Feels consensual. They seem like good people. Their process as a recording band looks archaic and unwieldy but I imagine it to be a lot of fun. Fourteen different people contribute to 'Ornaments Of Affection', not just as musicians but as singers and writers, too. Three produced. Two mixed. I marvel at this feat of collective sharing and production and the egalitarian division of tasks on the record. I imagine the joy of this social grouping would be present in a live setting with fourteen members crowding a stage, baton-passing instruments, calling out to a circle of friends in the crowd. But while there is an undoubted broader communal unity brought to bear on the thirteen songs presented here, it is the same diffuse and rotating of personnel and writers that undermines the album as a whole and makes it an egg for an invested and patient curate. 

Hard to speculate on a discreet process, but I doubt that Jason Roy, as leader and shaper, for all his other evident talents, is a tyrant of unbending vision and I strongly suspect that fun, fraternity and égalité were much higher priorities than the rigid rule of a guiding aesthetic (and maybe that is a nobler cause). So, for every moment of melodic flight there are three of leaden thump. For every graceful couplet, there are too many weighed down by the alignment of lockstep meter and overly full rhyme (houses, blouses, you, true) or lines awkwardly attenuated. For every leaner and cleaner musical idea, there are ten baggy ones, bloated in their arrangements or veiled in the gauze of misapplied effects post production. All of which is a shame if the unity of an end product is the only measure of its worth. Personally, I generally do end up taking the best of an artist forward with me (often in the form of just one or two songs) rather than the median or aggregate of an album or career and the best here is pretty good. Opener 'Oh, Mersey Days' is a wistful song of minor moods and the kind of unapologetic classicism of The Las's and The Go Betweens that boasts a great nasal & head lead vocal from Shane Tripp (sadly underused later). There is more Anglophilia in the other stand-out 'There To Be Had', a song that is slightly over-engineered with risers & bridgers, somewhat anchored by its couplet meter and rather blighted by a mismanaged fadeout (a recurring problem...Pam's prescription: listen to Jonathan Richman to learn how to end a song) but just about outruns all these impediments with its bright and shiny ribbons of Paisley underground guitar and another Shane Tripp vocal, sounding like a low rent Wayne Coyne. Elsewhere, things are a little more competent and ordinary, licks and solos are evidence of the quality and craft of the players and their careful interaction, but the constant committee-like crisis of congress makes it hard to discern a Sood identity that isn't really much more than the sum of the psych rock/pop spectres (Echo & The Bunnymen, Energy Gown, Missing Monuments, Camper Van Beethoven from my notes) that passed quickly through my head during the thicket of songs and I never escaped the feeling The Soods are a live band compromised by the choices and processes of a studio,  

Survey Channel / Pumice Stone & Other Vignettes

This is an ultra-modest petri dish of tiny, tentative experiments of synth and tape warp which is all the better for its refusal to open out into the puffed-up grandiloquence of that perplexingly vast genre of ersatz-vintage electronica that seems to preoccupy the minds and wallets of every sunless male I meet these days. It has no boring narrative or OST pretensions of being from an imaginary but wholly boring movie. It never wades out into developed themes of pomp prog and it refuses to don a supporting truss of tired, tired, tired, tired beats that tired, tired, tired, tired men reach for whenever their ladle fulls of analog synth gloop are sounding too much like ladles full of analog synth gloop - you know, gloop you have heard a million times this year even though you tried your best to turn off the tap. So bravo, Survey Channel for making a collection of virtuous and engaging vignettes that whimper and flicker and flash and bend and fold and stop and rub up against each other in interesting ways and don't amount to much more than a tiny test-tube testament to their creation by an alert musical mind.    

Repo Fam / Whipped Cream

Apart from the price tag ($8!), this EP could have come out in 1987. Maybe it did. Repo Fam may or may not be happy with that notion. It doesn't matter either way. Does it make it timeless? Static? Conservative? Depends on your age, I guess. It does sound like a tidier Sonic Youth or a looser Lovechild. That is going to be no bad thing for many. And a ho-hum thing for some. Sonic Youth were a ho-hum thing for people who saw Television. Who were ho-hum if you'd seen The Modern Lovers. Who were overly naïf arrivistes if you'd ever borne witness to the Velvets and the Stooges. Who came over white and stiff if you had encountered Bo Diddley in a small room. The present needs its present but it isn't the present of churn, novelty and progress. It is a present of recherchement and recovery, reminiscence and reference. Pop's present is the youthful clamour for unclaimed points of a highly-indexed culture. And if you are do go back and uncover, best make sure you are cool about it and recognise what is cool and remains cool and then stay cool when you deliver and record. Repo Fam are cool because they dig cool stuff like Beat Happening and Kenneth Anger films and 'The King Of Marvin Gardens' and their PR puff pulls the levers marked The Fall and Half Japanese because they are cool - not cos they are happening hipster catnip but cool. Hipsters aren't cool 'cos they end up in knots thinking that shit like Toto or Van Halen or Fleetwood Mac are cool when they are not and never will be.

There are four songs here and the third and fourth ones are best: 'Whipped Cream' and 'Here We Come'. They walk the precious/cheap, art/pop, pretty/petty, poetry/thump lines most successfully. Singer Michelle Peña's delivery is best on those two songs, too...escaping the Gordon-isms of  track 1 to find something that is winningly off-hand and beautifully off-key and resonant with something more private, less historical. Peña's timely tufts of synth speckling are another very positive feature of a promising set of recordings. Now, Repo Fam just have to find more of now and more of them to put into whatever they do next. I'll be listening.

: : (Four Dots) / Words That Don't Rhyme

This is what the full bore overflow pipe of modern music production should facilitate: those grandest of grand follies that dizzy and defy the listener comforts of genre gutters and the expectations of reasonable folk partly because they can and partly because they must. Art that flees not only fashion but the age itself by the primary means of not giving it a second thought.

: : (four dots if you really have to utter it) are two people, David Fair (Half Japanese, Coo Coo Rockin Time) and Swedish experimental artist Sara Ohm. The impulse on 'Words That Don't Rhyme' is that of a thought experiment made into music because there would be no other way to behold it if the artist did not make it. The idea is sound and simple enough - pair lots of non-rhyming (mostly concrete) nouns in a long inventory and set to music. That even makes the concept sound low but the effect of the whole is a mind-furring act of pure revelation. For over forty minutes and what feels like hundreds of pairings, the brisk and initially graspable inventory, transmogrifies into a pulmonary gasp of prosody and a thick weave of resonant poetry. Sara Ohm's delivery of the words & phrases is unwavering and unmannered without being inhuman. Stresses wander on and off meter or the meter corrects and drags itself. There is a non-native speaker energy in Ohm's probably novel encounters with couplings like "ankle bracelet and parrot cage", "newsprint and sun dial", "micro-management" and "dangling participle" that adds another layer of pleasure. There is no inherent momentum in her delivery even though I sometimes projected surges and peaks. There is no deliberate dampening down of the expressive intonation like John S Hall, or any adoption of a speech music lilt 'n' roll of Robert Ashley or Harry Partch even though both came to mind. The music is a fabulous, maddening maze of puce muzak, sickly and comic in its surfaces of shiny washes, brassless parping and synthetic birdsong, progressed by a brilliantly daft/deft and arresting (in both senses) rhythm that helps make the whole hover somewhere between the mall and museum, the Residents and Raymond Scott, but wholly within the singular vision of David Fair. The sum is hard to describe. There is a first tier conscious listen where you can revel in your favourite couplings ("bagpipes and lipgloss". "mistaken identity and shoehorn")....and even laugh out loud....which gives way to the tier 2 listen where totems from the subconscious conspire to make connections without your consent ("postcards from China and a snake shedding its skin") and then, there is tier 3 where the whole congeals into a vocal/music blancmange where meaning cannot be attended to, like an aria in a foreign tongue, and a hypnotic property takes hold and, before you know it, forty minutes have gone by and the piece has started playing again. I think...."conga drums and flossing"...."sugar bowl and prescription lenses"...."blueberry muffin and hello my name is blank sticker"....did I hear that?

Spacelab / Kaleidomission

What is the upside of the enormous, assymetric supply-side proliferation of music when the audience is so small, cashless and uninvolved? Uninvolved in their commitment, their stamina, their devotion...rather than their endlessly fitful diversion to the next thing...and the next..and the next. The ancient obstacles to the mountain top of music production and dissemination from the pre-digital age of capital exchange have been vaporized like pixel rock. What does it mean to be an artist like Spacelab in the ruinous rubble of 2020? Where do they site themselves? What do they think they are doing? Do they know how many other Spacelabs there have been (seriously)? Do they have any desire to individuate themselves at all?

It is so early in their development (this is their debut) it almost feels intrusive hearing it even in this shrunken public sphere and it feels borderline indecent for a wizened old critic like me to have at it. It is gauche enough to make you blush but competent enough to be routine. It is spirited enough to refer to Can and Faust and foolish enough to be made pale by the very thought of the comparison. It is earnest and untutored in a way that could turn out alright one day...with requisite abandonment and endeavour and adventure and real experiment rather than approximations of vintage signs uprooted from a once-rich semilogical realm, now floating, aimless and thin and stripped of meaning and resonance. Perhaps, that is the point. 

We could blame the parents. We could blame their education. We could blame the internet and Vaporwave 3.0. But we won't. I could have written about a thousand other efforts of similar status. An artist I know has been speculating that the landlside of ambient/auratic music released this year is part of a terrified flight to comfort and is as bourgeois and regressive as easy listening was in the age of atomic anxiety. There is plenty that is comforting and pleasant here....nothing would make me turn it off or run from the room or trouble me or make me fathom its source. And there is enough evidence to show that Spacelab can get myopically close to the surface textures of (mostly ersatz vintage) electronic voices to suggest they could yet fall into future wells of sound and stay submerged for (much, much) longer and emerge as spectralist composers of unheard scope and color. Kaleiodomission's sequencing and framing are never pompous (the label's publicity puff less so) and the fragments are rightly fragments stitched, rather post-facto, into a clichéd narrative whole that says nothing yet says it all.