This morning, while channel-surfing my way through endless rolling broadcasts of the Anzac Day centenary, I found myself on the National Indigenous Television network.
By virtue of its very existence, NITV probably provides the best tonic to the nationalistic chest-beating and nostalgic imperial frippery of the Gallipoli broadcasts. You may have heard that Anzac Day wasn’t the first territorial war that Australians were involved in, rite?
So in this spirit of sour colonial grapes and anti-Kochie resentment, I was delighted to catch a broadcast of a recent festival set by the legendary Coloured Stone.
Forming in South Australia in the late 1970s, Bunna Laurie’s band grew to be a crucial part of the wave of great Aboriginal Australian bands to rise to national prominence in the 1980s.
Dick Diver recently reminded us of just how good Laurie’s songs are, covering ‘Lonely Life’ on their New Name Blues 7″, which they put out on Fruits & Flowers in 2014.
And as the above video shows, Coloured Stone have still got it. To me, 'Waiting for the Tide’ is middle-aged music: it’s a tough and haggard song, wistful and world-weary, passionate yet thoughtful.
I guess it’s a song from a band that have seen a lot. It’s an emblem of the kind of reflective anti-Australiana that Gareth Liddiard and Paul Kelly strive so hard to convey.
Much has been written of the way that the music of those ‘80s bands — who fostered a kind of essential Australianness that rebuked exclusionary nationalism and the cultural cringe alike — took stock of the sprawling girth, oldness and diversity of our landscape through rock ‘n’ roll. The Triffids conjured that feeling at their very best, but Coloured Stone pull it off with ease.
So let ‘Waiting for the Tide’ serve as an introduction to the considerable back catalogue of this important band, and as the catch-cry for a more reflective Anzac Day.
PS. While we’re talking great Aboriginal music, everyone should listen to 'Swept Away,’ by legendary folksinger Shellie Morris. That chorus. Goddamn.
Adelaide’s Fair Maiden play a sweet and mean-spirited brand of dry ‘n’ dusty ‘60s pop. Ellen Carey’s voice and songs are powerful and understated. She recalls Nico or Nancy Sinatra, or something. I dunno. Fair Maiden are really good.
Carey’s band is also a who’s-who of Adelaide’s most interesting music-makers: Stephanie Crase of Summer Flake; Liam Kenny of Bitch Prefect; Joel Carey of Peak Twins.
Bedroom Suck put out their debut full-length in 2014, which launched in Melbourne at Dane Certificate’s magic shop. I was lucky enough to be there, where I missed Sarah Mary Chadwick’s set but saw Totally Mild for the first time. What a bill.
Anyway, Fair Maiden’s new video for Poison premiered on Brooklyn Vegan a couple of days ago. I was going to post this on the day that it came out, but I forgot. Nevertheless, the video is still new and very purple. Give it a crack.
Kuba Kapsa Ensemble — Vantdraught 10 Vol.1 (Denovali)
Listen: Kuba Kapsa Ensemble — No. 4
One of these days, I’m going to have to sort out what I really think about the current state of ‘modern classical’ music. Stay tuned for a long discursive post.
Until then, my thoughts about the genre’s latest aesthetic pirouettes will remain a jumbled deck of cards. But suffice to say, intriguing trails are being blazed in the realms of ‘modern composition’.
Certain tenets of chamber music are newly relevant in an age of drone, phonography and digital experimentation.
It would be wrong to say that classical music ever really languished in irrelevance. But something has certainly changed about the way we package and consume the ‘classical’.
The roster of artists, working across genres, who currently claim a ‘classical’ mantle or audience is impressive.
Examples? Bing & Ruth, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Hauschka, Robert Curgenven.
Yet there’s also a troubling side to classical music’s recent cool rebranding and internet-age democratisation.
This can be a growing inattention to the works that came before; an increasingly shallow pool of inspiration. The result? A narrowing of the diversity of the output that actually manages to cut through to a wide audience.
Basically, despite the wondrous diversity of work out there, what seems to have truly cut through is the recent explosion of gorgeous — but uninspired — minimalist ambience; a thousand Olafur Arnaldses, Winged Victories for the Sullen, and Nils Frahms. (Sorry Erased Tapes for singling your artists out here).
Ben Frost put the issue well, if a little self-importantly, in an interview with Rolling Stone last year:
[I’m] trying to circumvent this new generation of Arvo Pärt [and] Górecki fans that got themselves a copy of Sibelius and decided to call themselves "composers." It's sad piano and some kind of electronic atmosphere, and then that's a record.
Ouch. Read the full interview here.
I recently reviewed a new work by Polish pianist-composer Kuba Kapsa for 4ZZZ. I thought the record was great, precisely because it sidestepped the reasons for Frost’s gloominess.
Drawing influences from the greats of 20th-century classical music, avant-garde jazz and (to my ear at least) a little Nordic metal, the first of Kapsa’s Vantdraught series is a challenging and beguiling listen. It’s dark and sour — Apollonian music played with dirty hands, in a soiled chamber.
Surely, too, the fact that this kind of work came out on Denovali, and not on what Headphone Commute recently called a ‘serious’ classical label such as Deutsche Grammophon, bodes well. I want to hear more music like this, in this way.
Read my review of Vantdraught for 4ZZZ here.
Plus: from the archives, my thoughts on pianist Carlos Cipa’s 2014 Denovali release All Your Life You Walk, also for 4ZZZ.
BONUS LINK: my thoughts on Ben Frost’s ambitious yet ultimately pointless AURORA remix album, V A R I A N T (2014).
Primitive Motion — Pulsating Time Fibre (Bedroom Suck)
Listen: Primitive Motion — Golden Light Clinic
Simply put, Brisbane duo Primitive Motion are one of the best bands in Australia. Over the past few years, Leighton Craig and Sandra Selig have honed a warm, melancholic sound that is immediately recognisable as uniquely their own.
Woozy sax, analog bleeps and bloops, yearning vocals, unbalanced Blank Realm-esque live drums, electronic kraut beats, cosmic themes, shoegaze-damaged drones: Primitive Motion do it all with elegance and restraint, while still retaining the spontaneity and panache of a live band.
Their last two records came out on the stellar Bedroom Suck imprint, and the band’s work fits beautifully with the current direction of the label (see Angel Eyes, Ela Stiles, Superstar and Peter Escott in particular).
Crawlspace ran a great piece on Primitive Motion’s previous album and B–S–R debut, Worlds Floating By, last year. Check it out here.
What I really want you to look at, though, is my recent review of the band’s latest LP, Pulsating Time Fibre, on the 4ZZZ New Releases show. You can read it here. In hindsight, The Mario Kart reference was a little dumb.
'Burning Bridge’ is taken from the English group’s fifth album and third release on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow (2015).
The band take an unusually mechanical approach to English folk music, locking into rhythmic grooves that slowly unfold with the structural organisation of classic Steve Reich and the dynamic intensity of a post-rock band.
The bald emotionality of the playing counterbalances a sound that could otherwise easily come off as stern and formalistic.
Each member — guitar, fiddle, mandolin and piano accordion — is active at all times, giving Spiro’s dense arrangements a constant liveliness. Like the smooth, composerly techno of Jon Hopkins or Kangding Ray, their music is effervescent and ever-changing, yet still machinelike in its relentless propulsive force.
One problem I’ve had with Spiro’s formative releases such as Pole Star (1997) and Lightbox (2009) is that this birdlike spryness can come off a little awkwardly on the album format. Both these records were predominantly made up of extremely short, richly realised sets of a similar tempo that seemed to end just as they got started.
Each tune quickly gives way to another very similar one, while what I find myself urging Spiro to do is to take up a little more of what Les Murray calls ‘the quality of sprawl.’ Although in a more twee, English pastoral way, of course.
This is what Spiro manage to pull off with ‘Burning Bridge.’ They now sound like a more mature band, less hyperactive, sure of the boundaries of their unique sound, content to let the tune unfold over a longer time span. And the results, as you can hear above, are beautiful.
I spent last Wednesday night at the Melbourne Folk Club. I was there for the launch of One House, the sophomore album from local Irish band Tolka.
Tolka recorded One House in Belfast last year with Brian Finnegan, a legendary flute and whistle player best known for his work with Flook and progressive folk supergroup Kan.
Finnegan’s influence runs deep through Tolka’s complex, jazzy work. Their jigs and reels are fresh and heartfelt, the arrangements nimble. The flute and fiddle intertwine and chase each other, underpinned by delicate guitar work and a tenor banjo that flits between the fore and background.
My high school jazz band conductor used to say that the mark of true musicianship is being able to play fast and quiet. Like fellow young Melbournites The Simpson Three, Tolka cleared this bar with ease at their launch, delivering a high-energy set that lost nothing in delicacy or feeling.
It’s already been a great year for live instrumental folk music in Australia. Since Christmas, I’ve caught Lau at Woodford, Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas in Warrandyte, Trouble in the Kitchen at Brunswick Music Festival, and the East Pointers at the Bella Union. All were great. And I didn’t even go to Port Fairy or the National Folk Festival.
Much is made these days of the future of folk music. The stock line for the aforementioned bands is that they pay their respects to Celtic tradition while refusing to be bound slavishly to the canon.
Traditional music, once lambasted for looking myopically inwards and languishing in staid nationalism, now confidently gazes outward at the wider musical world of which it is a part. This current reinvigoration of folk draws readily on a raft of influences including modern classical, jazz and post-rock. Happily, too, this is by no means limited to Celtic traditions.
To me, this progressive spirit is most clearly embodied in celebrated young Irish fiddler Caoimhin ó Raghallaigh, whose music draws as readily on Nordic traditions as it does on ambient and minimalist musics.
Other essential listening here includes ó Raghallaigh's breathtaking This is How We Fly — a semi-improvised ensemble that combines amplified percussive dancing, looped bass clarinet and percussion — and transatlantic supergroup The Gloaming, whose combination of Gaelic singing, chamber music didactics and raw emotion is thrilling to behold.
Now, it’s often easy to find a self-congratulatory tendency when reading about new directions in folk. Commentators readily see each promising young trad act offering as offering a roseate glimpse into the crystal ball of global folk’s future.
It’s important to avoid thinking like this — movements only seem like ‘movements’ in retrospect (just look at recent signs of the so-called death of ‘dolewave’), and not every new band is a flagbearer for an important cultural sea change. Sometimes musicians just make music, and this happens to add up to something special.
But with that being said, present trends in trad music still seem immensely exciting, and I think Tolka belongs in these conversations. Their bright, fresh tunes ring out like an exotic wind of change tickling the strings of an old aeolian harp, and they bode well for the global future of Celtic folk.
Part of this also relates to that perennial problem in traditional folk music: audience. How do we bring da yoof in? These days, it seems, that’s less of a problem.
Like a folk festival, the Bella Union last Wednesday was a mixed bag. The venue was packed, bearded lifers rubbing shoulders with urbane wine-drinkers and engaged younger punters. The Melbourne Folk Club knows what it’s doing, and as usual, it fostered a charming mood, diverse and appreciative.
So I count Tolka as a local manifestation of an important wider set of ideas (not a ‘movement’) currently taking shape in folk and ‘world’ musics. I hear global changes when I listen to Tolka. The launch was great.
Listen: Sufjan Stevens — No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross
In the latest issue of the Monthly, music writer Anwen Crawford offers some insightful thoughts on Sufjan Stevens’ near-universally lauded new album, Carrie & Lowell. You can read Crawford’s article here (possible paywall).
I think it’s an important piece, not least because Crawford offers a rare dissenting perspective among the thicket of glowing reviews of the American darling of twee’s return to homespun indie-folk. Like the record, Crawford’s review itself is deeply ambivalent. In short, she argues, Carrie & Lowell is as technically gorgeous as it is problematic.
I happen to agree. Read on to find out why.
The problem hinges on a question of audience: who is Stevens really singing for? Between his intensely personal balladeering and the pedantic neo-baroque instrumentation that underpins it, Sufjan leaves precious little space for us, the listeners. Carrie & Lowell isn’t exactly cold; despite myself, I’m deeply moved by Stevens’ smoky, tired, vernacular whisper. Rather, it’s listening too closely to Carrie & Lowell that leaves me feeling cold.
It’s clear that this is a record for and about Stevens’ perpetually absent, now dead, mother. On Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan offers a personal counter-history, a delicate retelling of his life, from his birth to Carrie’s recent death. It provides fresh insights into the human mind of the distant, angel-winged artist that presided over the orchestral pageantry of Michigan (2003) and Illinois (2005), and honest, unromantic treatments of his closest relationships — stepfather, brother, religion.
It’s a poignant and intelligent achievement, delicately paced and with a patient ear for melody. It’s mature and understated, sure, but it’s also a bewildering and distant work.
The bare, acoustic Seven Swans (2004) is the most obvious point of comparison from Sufjan’s own career, and the difference between the two albums is illuminating. Carrie & Lowell also has the close, stuffy feel of Seven Swans — both are like being trapped in a closet with Stevens and several small stringed instruments — yet unlike his humble 2004 effort, Carrie is assembled with the widescreen ambition and capacious organisation of his grander works.
Seven Swans also leaves slightly more room to breathe and reflect, to find yourself if necessary (or even God, if you’re into that sort of thing). Lyrically, it’s more oblique than Carrie, and the production is less stuffy, less perfect — it doesn’t demand the listener’s attention, and work and concentration are required in order to make sense of it.
Neither of these are features of Carrie & Lowell, which is uniformly soaked in a light reverb that is somehow just too ethereal. It’s like the whole album is bathed in the cool white lighting of a TV studio or modern design magazine: it’s beautiful, but somehow distant. You don’t hear much of the room in which it was made, or if you do, it’s not a comfortable, lived-in space.
Perhaps, then, the real problem with Carrie & Lowell it that despite the heartrending didactics of its songs, the record is somehow too bald, too organised and specific for any of the emotions conveyed thereon to be extrapolated into any separate or personal context. It’s hard to take any of Sufjan’s feelings as universal, which is surely what we’re after when we devote our time to ‘confessional’ singer-songwriters (and poets, and authors, and playwrights, for that matter).
The best works toss us some emotional crumbs from the table to relate to. This needn’t be a deliberate process, but connecting shouldn’t be a laboured process. Carrie & Lowell does not readily do this, and this is where the record falls down. It’s not about human experiences — family, love, grief, mental illness — it is just about Sufjan’s experiences. And it’s what we learn about Sufjan that is problematic for me.
There’s none of the joy of exploration here. I’m not saying it has to be fun, but I would expect something a little more inventive or adventurous from Stevens. It’s like he’s learned the rules so well that he needn’t try too hard anymore; he never feels stretched, or even that vulnerable. There’s nothing wrong with a plain, homespun work of emotion — for recent examples, see Grouper’s (excellent) Ruins (2014) and Waxahatchee’s (pretty good) Ivy Tripp (2015).
In comparison, I find something distasteful, if not outright distressing, in Carrie & Lowell, as though I’ve come away knowing too much about a man I neither know nor particularly like. My parents would be mortified if I wrote so candidly about my relationship with them, without changing their names, to a potentially unlimited audience. Should it be different for Sufjan? And why does he want me to know so much about himself?
Let’s be clear here; I’m not talking about the ethics of writing a personal or confessional record. This is the artist’s decision and it doesn’t concern me here. It’s an interesting idea that belongs to a later article. Rather, as a music writer, I’m interested in the artistic merit of having Sufjan Stevens bare it all in such a total way on this record.
For me, this problem is best borne out on the album’s cover, which features a picture of Stevens’ (dead) mother and (living) stepfather. It locks the rest of the world out of consideration; it seems to say, these are the people this record is about, and no one else. Perhaps this is just the way that a man inured to giving his very self to public performances operates, but I still find this move strangely disturbing.
Maybe you can just file Carrie & Lowell alongside another record I don’t quite get: Benji, Sun Kil Moon’s equally beloved, equally minimal, equally deathly 2014 opus. At its best, Benji is a record of staggering power and beauty, but — and let’s be clear, I’ve not yet found anyone who agrees with me on this — I find it to be a profoundly ugly and self-indulgent document.
I’ve listened to Benji at least ten times since it came out last year, and I feel conflicted every time I do so. There are many things I like about it. Combined with the angelic nylon-string backing, Mark Kozelek’s disarmingly insolent delivery and brutal, queasy lyrics pass him off as the ultimate foil to any pretension at folk wholesomeness (I once heard Gareth Liddiard open an unplugged set by muttering ‘I fucking hate folk music’ to the assembled folkies. Dark clouds. That kinda vibe).
Yet, for all its oh-so-very-self-conscious bile, at the same time, listening to Benji feels like listening to something that’s truly important. It’s moving and huge and personal. But yet, Kozelek’s presence somehow looms too heavily over his own attempt to loom heavily over the proceedings.
To me it feels like he depicts himself as an earnest asshole in the hope that we see him as a loveable earnest asshole, but in the process he remains just an earnest asshole trying to pass himself off as another kind of earnest asshole. The double bluff doesn’t come off convincingly, and something doesn’t quite sit right about the album. Sure, I guess that’s the point, but Benji still seems to shoot itself in the foot in the execution.
How can I put this? For all the host of people who poignantly die over the stark span of its sixty minutes, Benji is really only about one person. Its author, Mark Kozelek, is the hero and the centre of the world that is the record, and it is because of this that Benji uneasily fails.
(The same is true of Father John Misty’s wonderful yet troubling recent LP, I Love You, Honeybear; the knowledge that the misanthropic cynic behind the album is not quite as misanthropic or cynical as he wants you to believe somehow calls into question the entire emotional content of the record. No one likes to be taken for a fool.)
Take, for instance, one of the Benji’s weaker moments, the awkward Pray for Newtown. For me, it’s not important for Kozelek to bluntly tell us how he felt about the tragic shootings that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in late 2012. If the essence of great storytelling is mimesis, the much-vaunted writerly ability to show and not tell, then Kozelek’s choice of self-indulgent, agonisingly wordy, heavily diegetic prose comes off as clunky at worst.
Neither, too, is it relevant that he wrote a letter to the shooter. Is this song about ‘the children who lost their lives,’ or just about how much of an empathetic man Kozelek wants us to think he is? Does his verbal diahorrea cast a cunning scythe at the idea that the messiness of life can be wrangled into the contrivance of a song, or can he just not kill his darlings?
Perhaps I just have no heart. After all, these are real lives, man. But I can’t help but see a certain American mawkishness in all this, the performer’s confidence that a large audience can soothe any ache, that baring one’s soul and singing about dead relatives on KEXP or late-night TV will somehow salve any emotional hurt, no matter how previously private.
(N.B. Don’t get me wrong; at its best, Benji can be astonishing. I find the penultimate track Micheline extraordinarily powerful, especially when the somewhat oblique meaning of the album’s title itself becomes clear.)
It’s not quite that these are fake sentiments — there’s no Hollywood smoke and mirrors lurking beneath the plaid, bespoke veneer of these records — and it’s not that these artists’ motives are necessarily venal. I just question the directness with which they attempt to convey their messages, and the waters that get muddied in the time it takes to pull off the affectation.
Let’s take another example. In a recent review of the American remake of ABC suburban drama The Slap, Grantland’s Andy Greenwald observes that the core failing of both Christos Tsiolkas’ novel and its two television adaptations is that the work uncritically conflates conflates easily observable yuppie phenomena with profound sociological truths.
For me, this is where both Stevens and Kozelek stumble: depth of description does not a priori equate to subtlety of artistic vision. These songwriters may be able to dredge up every intimate and sordid detail of their respective childhoods and stretch them delicately over the frame nine or eleven tracks, but that doesn’t mean they should necessarily commit everything to tape. Less is more, or something.
Another insightful point of comparison may be found with Björk. In Pitchfork’s profile of the iconic Icelandic artist prior to the release of the stunning Vulnicura earlier this year (read my review of the album for 4ZZZ here), Björk speaks at length of the personal upheaval that inspired and sustained her as an artist and, in this reviewer’s opinion, resulted in what may well be her finest record.
The candour with which Björk discusses the breakdown of her family in the interview is bracing, and it enriches the experience of her lush and theatrical record. Yet Vulnicura itself approaches the singer’s pain as an artistic subject that operates on both a biological and a cosmic scale, rather than a series of intimate details to be plumbed with impunity. Rather, the album is oblique, subtle, coy, allegorical. Unlike the static downer that is Carrie & Lowell, Vulnicura takes the listener on a journey, through time and emotions. It’s a masterclass in dignity and ambition. We don’t need to know everything about what happened to her.
Plus, crucially, Vulnicura needn’t be entirely about Björk. In the Pitchfork piece, she reflects at length on the merit of the gendered trope of the ‘breakup album,’ from Joni Mitchell through Lykke Li (let’s not talk about Alanis Morrisette), and the place of female ‘confession’ and pain in the harsh gaze of the public light. It’s a powerful read, and it amounts to much more than a sad story. And it’s here where Vulnicura parts from Carrie & Lowell, for the better.
So I think Anwen Crawford is right about Carrie & Lowell. It is a surface album; it stunned me on first listen, intrigued me on the second, and repelled me on the third. In the way that we never let signs that scream ‘Achtung! Shallow water!’ spoil our fun in the lakes and streams of this continent, Stevens’ album invites a deep dive that turns out to be not quite as deep or as rewarding as it promises.
And yet the warning is plain to see: Carrie & Lowell is the story of Carrie and Lowell, and nothing more. It’s an abject and heartfelt true story, but there’s not much to take away from it after a listen or two.
//Henry
PS: speaking of Anwen Crawford’s writing, a while back she penned a great article about making a pilgrimage to Nick Drake’s grave. I highly recommend it.
It’s about halfway into ‘On GP’, when the storm of marching drums and distorted fuzz gives way to a droning organ and twanged guitars. MC Ride, menacing yet morose, raps about seeing the cloaked figure of Death approach and offer a weapon, saying “Use at your discretion/It’s been a pleasure, Stefan”. It’s one of the darkest moments for Death Grips.
But Jenny Death feels like a fresh breath of life when it looked like the band was starting to run out of ideas. Björk samples and electronic instrumentals are quirky, but there comes a point where I lust for the savagery of earlier records.
Maybe it’s the cathartic organs and guitars, maybe it’s the familiarity of MC Ride, maybe it’s the drawn-out jams - Jenny Death feels human and more approachable than previous Death Grips releases. Tracks are served with brutal simplicity and contain an energy that was lacking on Niggas on The Moon, without compromising the ability to stretch the listener’s boundaries of comfort. Starting with the ballistic charge of ‘I Break Mirrors With My Face in the United States’ (what a title!) all the way through to the scatterbrained ‘Death Grips 2.0,’ Jenny Death offers little room for relaxation. The lyrics are also a sensory shakeup, involving anger, depression and perversion - ‘PSS PSS’ morphs into a new age ‘Whisper Song,’ but even the Ying Yang Twins could not conjure such deviance.
This probably won’t be the end for Death Grips, going by their history of backflips and mystery, yet Jenny Death feels like a bookend. No controversy or surprise, just an album that makes you remember how thrilling Death Grips can be.
Close to Spectacular: let’s see how this goes, yeah?
the authors, obstreperous and disorderly in their youth. 2012.
Such sweet sound. Everyone likes things, but sometimes you come to really, really, really like some things and need a good outlet to express it. We like listening to music and now that the internet is doing well for itself, we can use it to write about the music we enjoy.
It might become sporadic. It might even become chaotic. Who knows?
Henry and Dwayne
Close To Spectacular @closetospectacular - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
