sielwolf's Journal: You Don't Own Me

The current estimate has me buying less than 21 albums this year. Who the fuck knows, eh? Funny, ironic- or neither of those. What much am I looking forward to? Hmmm, dunno. There's a new Masta Killa disc coming out. Maybe Portishead will finally drop? Then there's that Villalobos vinyl which (hopefully) will get released in some plastic/electronic form. But there is a great air bubble, pushing up through the water, into my brain, ready for the big skull-artery blow out. That's the adventure. I've been toying with getting a Grace Jones comp (for her covers of Roxy Music and the Normal respectively) or actually getting some Roxy Music (whom my interest for is very sporatic) or going out and buying up all the old girl group shit I wanted. Sadly all that Phil Spector stuff is spread out a bit too much. Either you're buying 60 dollar comps or dropping heavy coin on discs and discs of artists. And then there's my girl Lesley Gore who inspired one of the best online comics. But I vacillate. So it's early February and I haven't bought much. Oh, I did buy a Deadboy iTunes exclusive. But album wise: only two deep.

But, interestingly, both have formed the bulk of my listening for the last month. I told you before I was excited for the new Cat Power. I got What would the Community Think? heavily on the nostalgia tip. I've skirted the whole obsesse hip of Chan Marshall: talking about hot she is, talking about how every dialogue comes back to how "hawt" she is (in that incredibly overdone way people go hyperbolic on these niche beauties. You can say the same thing about Scarlett Johansson. Please, sit her next to a Monica Bellucci or Jennifer Connelly and see how she stacks up. She's banking on alternative credit), how crazy she is, how her being crazy might all be a schtick, how she ditches shows, how she's annoying, how she's so important, how there's no more cliches to run on, how all reviews of her albums descend into punctated lists that go no where. Chan Marshall is neither the world's strongest lyricist, doesn't have the strongest voice, isn't an overpowering guitarist. Before her work was built around making music in spite of these flaws. It was good-bad, the way mothers singing to children is true. But I didn't have interest in the mystique, so I took a bare passing interest, got the first album for shits and giggles and had no urge to hear her new stuff.

But then "The Greatest" was put on the Matador site and I sat up: ho shit! She's staying within the bounds of her voice! She's doing this kind of Memphis blues thing! It's all low tune, quiet shit! And it works!!

The Greatest follows this template. You can go to any of the other sites, the NYT or whatnot to find out about how she travelled off to the side of Tennessee that meets the long water and collaborated with some Old Hands. Listen longer for them to talk about a measure of authenticity that has blessed her work. Come to this motherfucker and hear this: girl has finally accepted what she is and made an album of it. The Greatest is a small, bluesy, indie album that is half-whispered, half-cry and just a good all around slow rocking jam. The titular track works because it is a self-deprecating slander against our own young intentions to some slight piano. "Once I wanted to be, the Greatest..." More of the album is that soft familiar area of love songs, splinter under fingernail emotion and the like. A braver man would say this has something of a Tom Waits feel (if you took the caveat that this was his more blues-historical work and also that your boy has a- neutral aversion to Waits' music). A more roundly hipster coup gathering man would make nods to quasi-ironic 70's bedrocks that are usually viewed down the long axis of the nose (but also have the quality of being out of the popular music foreground for so long that there is a certain credibility to be gained by drawing tangents to their music) maybe the quieter Linda Ronstadt or Carly Simon.

But it obscures inertia: the hipsters are mining that same 70's catalog now for the country rock they suffered through in childhood car trips. They threw up middle digits to "Lady" and eighteen wheels and a dozen roses but now are running the hype wagon on Jenny Lewis and her low cut tops. A few more releases, a couple of Jack White collaborations with country music's old guard and there will be a big XLR8R article. But its still all James Frey provision: it's the artifacts of country and the same still urbanized hipster core. "Lived in Bars" is the kind of song that would get people to imagine to dancing to in a bar with peanut shells on the floor and chicken wire. "Could We" could make it on a Sundance submission. But its no where closer to country than last year.

Stripped of that, The Greatest is a pretty good album with some notable songs but enough that cause it to slip out of your mind and you soon find it over. "Willie" is a faux biographical track with a little mournful hornstabs over the chorus with a hushed backing of Chans. I think I'm partial to this song because Chan doesn't screech and fall flat on the high "Willie was-" Its a kind, sweet agony. And I like it.

"Empty Shell" and "The Moon" are more radio-ready of the Cat Power misanthropy. How the moon is not only beautiful and not only cold but- You get the idea. The songs shuck off enough of the sad bastardism to keep us from an annoying pity fest. Closing the album is the great "Love and Communication" which, I don't know why, has me going back to old REM. You know, this is the sort of album that could have come out of Athens, GA back in the day. "L&C" has this wonderful spiffy organ bit and this sweetly snarled vocal about it. Chan is channeling that "Driver 8" bit. This is probably about as much as she's willing to rock. The Greatest is a good album. But two weeks after it came out, I've listened to it dozens of times and yet haven't had it grow up on me. Is it too quiet for me to rock on my work speakers? The album just doesn't have the heart to leave a mark on you after it ends.

In a different way, 3 by Final hits me. So it's another Justin Broadrick project. Somewhere out there in big, heavy and nasty it's going to lie. But where it lays will always intrigue me. As an artist, he's grown more interesting. When Godflesh started tearing apart the Amen break, going into heavy layers of processing and just straying from the musical structure they had built, lots of fans were furious. I didn't get it: wasn't the entire point to experience the unexpected? Each of his albums always seems to catch my eye differently. There's something about it. And how he expresses himself in his exploration brings me a distinct pleasure. I was kind of pissed when Godflesh broke up. But in the interim we've had several killer Techno Animal releases, Curse of the Golden Vampire, Tech Level 2 and Jesu. These projects formed the periphery of his sound, where Godflesh was more of the median executive summary. A same its gone, but now each release is an unadulturated point of his sound.

Final, it is, was his first project, the one before Napalm Death and Head of David and Fall of Because. It was Justin's Whitehouse act. It was all noise-processing. And he's returned to it from time to time, 3 being the cumination of six years of work. It's two discs, almost 2 and a half hours. Noise. Sound.

When I ripped it at work and put it on the playlist, my coworker was inquisitive and said it sounded like a computer making hushed platter search noises. Days later he was singing along with the thing. Another fellow came in, older, and after a half an hour asked me if I had heard any early Eno. Other than some passing listens to Music for Airports/Elevators he told me he'd burn me some.

It intrigued me. We all know (or we may not): I like to rip Merzbow. "Noise" as a genre and category seems like a stupid prank, like seeing who can eat the most tampons out of the girl's bathroom trashcan. It's not music.

"Well no shit. It says so on the label: noise! Duh!"

Fuck that. Music is sound of a quality that is distinguishible from unconstructed sound. Lyrics and rhythm and beat and vocals and Meaning are standards but that's just formula. Most folks who see 2001: A Space Odyssey don't realize what a revolution it was in filmmaking. That movie was the annihilation of narrative. See, most people can probably pin together what the end of 2001 is about. Dave goes in, seems to be under observation, grows old, and is reborn. Repeat viewings will remind them that this transformation parallels the one that Stargazer undergoes at the beginning. The nuances escape them but they can grok that much.

Of course most just expect the answer to wash over them, are annoyed when the frontlobes of their brain start to activate and then go for Cliff's Notes for the cheat. But acknowledging their own construction of the theme of the movie, by piecing together the parts of the film, they've done a classic deconstructivist task: they've conjured theme and meaning from where there are just parts. That 2001 was the first major film to do this creates a pinion at its release date in the 20th century. Before there was nothing like it, and only after it existed could a movie like Koyaanisqatsi be made. The product isn't a holistic structure, but a vessel containing atomic symbols to be reconstructed by the observer.

That's what 2001 did and that's what Noise (as a genre) is supposed to be.

A casual listen to 3 would find several easy high points. "Eden" and its a harsh aquatic guitar squeal. "Golden" and its synthesized chord reconstruction. "Sorry" and its creepy as fuck Chinese wind-up toy sound. But on a loop deeper pieces appear. "Eden" has a counter to the sharp guitar sample. It builds a beautiful little call and response. Lost birds chirping at each other. And then it ends with a casual cast off interpolative coda. After a bit, these songs once sounding as the 2 minute-a-piece meat cast about lazily through a shitload of filler form peaks in a wider open terrain. The harsh white light of "Laughing Stock" followed by "Hollow" which is ethereal in the way the most meditative parts of Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 is, suceeded by the echoing loop of "Little Pictures". The dull empty roar of "Barely Here". The looped, reversed, looped guitar loops of "Long Lost" (the album's most classic construction). Someone might have at one time used the bits here and there as outros but in long form the result is mysterious. I doubt 3 could work if reduced to just the high points, or even one 70 minute release. It's aspect is only visible from a great distance. The songs go from just six seconds under two minutes to over seventeen and half minutes long. "Northpole" is a monstrous track. Watching John Carpenter's The Thing last night might have been dumb luck. But here is a song that captures what a continent blizzard would sound like. In brazen hands, this song's harsh tones would be left wide open. But Justin caps the sounds so it forms a dull wide buzz that won't blow speakers or turn most people's ear. Have you ever heard that large sound in the wilderness where it seems that a great force has closed off the sky and is building up from the mountains' edges and collapsing in at you? I imagine it as the apex of nature's heartbeat; a sound you hear in isolation when the world does not care you notice that it. sees. you.

I like this album, in spite of my own biases... or because of them. This couldn't form the body of my listening and my tastes probably shoot a very small window. Justin is someone I always look for and for those familiar, you'll notice his signature on most of it. 3 justifies itself: it begs you to return, to put it on and let it slide against you. Something can be created from this. A mixtape probably isn't it.

Cat Power The Greatest ****
Final 3 ****