3/5
[Leaf; 2007]
Styles: musique concrete, electronic composition
Others: Gyorgy Ligeti, JLIAT

The holiday season is here once again. Snow is settling quietly outside, stockings are being hung, kitchens are thick with the smell of mince pies. Lists are checked and gifts are bought: it’s a time for giving, while we grind our teeth in to a fine powder, dredging up the willpower to maintain selfless affection for three sanctioned weeks.

My December is being spent as usual: rounding up waifs and vagrants on the street and ushering them into my beautiful manor where I can sing carols at them and wash their feet with my hair.

But only after being invited into the dining hall for an afternoon meal as Wentworth lifted the pewter covers from each platter did one of the little wretches pipe in, “What…what [is] that?”

The audacity! The cheek! The [nerve] of the boy! As I was uncovering my bejewelled walking stick to administer a beating the likes he would never forget, Wentworth began to describe what lay before them. “Cosmos, sir…” he began with a sneer.

“Drained from the melodic juices of previous works, Cosmos is left to bubble atop of a seething pan of sharp shards of metal, to be later buttered with a mechanical hum. It is then combined with the corpse of Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti and left on a light simmer, shucking the traditional use of samples for a variation of Musique Concrete as organic sounds and original classical instruments are fed into the meal. We then make sure to thin all acoustic elements until they become an almost unrecognisable porridge of lock grooves and mathematical precision. Strings are layered overtop of a vast recess of humming silence: a conceptual interpretation of the cosmos that is occasionally sparked to life with the sloth-like passing of a pebble curving with gravity, only to be plucked back in to a black pool of space minutes later, leaving you to dip your toes in to the sucking whirlpools of yet even more echoing silence. When fully cooked in polytonal vibration this is to be served as a giant, faceless black monolith. Not to be eaten, of course, but to stare down at you forebodingly until you begin to cry.”

The look of doe-eyed panic befell them as they recoiled in terror and bolted in to the white afterglow of the frozen streets.

It’s the same thing every year.

1.Cuerpo Celeste

2.Cielo

3. Cosmos - (I)

4. Cometa

5. Cosmos - (II)

6. Oort

Labels: Music

3/5
[Quarterstick; 2007]
Styles: literate, Spinal Tap-ian Stonehenge
Other: Hank Williams, Gang of Four

I hope that none of you ever experience the agony of reviewing a band whose discography rivals The Fall. Beginning with their first release Fast Product and straight through toward their most recent album Natural is approximately twenty-eight years worth of music to overview. Twenty-eight years. Eighteen albums. There’s some cruel irony in the semantic history of their name (based on the 1950s comic character The Mekon whose minuscule, atrophied body was punctuated by a massive, swollen head) and the throbbing headache felt after eighteen consecutive albums. Actually, twenty-eight condensed years of music is just about enough time for the cells to start collecting in your brain; ample time for thousands of them to form spongy white tumours overlapping strategically in to a cantaloupe-headed comic book homage. Send me through a CAT scan. Show me that my skull has deteriorated into a perfect representation of “I (heart) Mekons". Tell me my ribosomes have been replaced by the first quarter of lyrics from “Never Been in a Riot.”

Analysing something this contextually heavy becomes a process of eliminating useless information. After all, what can really be said about prolific bands? They grew up, their style changed, band members left, they grabbed new instruments. Now and then I do wish you readers could come on this side of music journalism. It’s baffling how easily reviewing can degrade into something woefully similar to a liner-notes biography. As you read this a lost writer has introduced their ten-page The Mekons press release to a Cuisinart. Press “On” and keep a glue stick nearby. Paste and dry. The review you’re glancing through right now is very likely the result of that process. This is a process of erroneously stacking information, and leaving only a single thread of actual critical opinion in this compost of literary crap.

Is this the tradition a reviewer is meant to follow? Let me cut your reading to a bare minimum and condense Natural in to a sentence:

[Analysis]: A 1,2 bit3 c4l5oy6ing.

It’s a nebulous statement that most prolific bands will suffer significantly from comparisons to its previous work. With the weight of multiple releases, new albums become the sum of its past: that’s the typical process of hermeneutic interpretation. But the significance lies in the extent that it can be simplified. Most reviews I’ve read of Natural drown the critical aspect in statements like “punk going country” and “celebrating over 25 years of Pop.” But this isn’t contextualising a genre, this stenches of biographical platitudes.

Journalism shouldn’t become as formulaic as the music it often criticises. Yet elements of this kind formulaic tendency seep in to The Mekons newest album. The overriding element of Natural is the band's sense of experimentation, merging punk with semi-transcendentalist folk. But while The Mekons are a punk band which has reached toward country roots, the merging of genres has becomes a standard expectation of the band and the act of "experimental" merging alone becomes as persistent a structure as the critical banalities of its reviews. The criticism devolves in to a sentence of actual analyses with every strum, while words are sporadically thrown on the literary scaffolding of press kit factoids.

1. Dark Dark Dark

2. Dickie Chalkie And Nobby

3. Old Fox, The

4. White Stone Door

5. Shocking Curse Bird

6. Give Me Wine Or Money

7. Diamonds

8. Burning In The Desert Burning

9. Hope And The Anchor, The

10. Cockermouth

11. Zeroes And Ones

12. Perfect Mirror

Labels: Music

Labels: Music