The new gang of four sounds kind of like the new wire, and both remind me some of that newest david byrne/eno thing which leads into ‘wall street two: the new gilded age closes out’. David bowie could come back right now, but it wouldn’t be quite comfortable for anyone I don’t think. There’s nothing wrong with it—every generation has to age, and a unified cooldad front is kind of funny, particularly in this the post-lcd soundsystem world, but it begins to toe a line and raise a hackle on a kill your idols style animal, etc. what do we owe them now, reeeaallyyy, if we really think about it? I mean, again, not bad per se, just need to be appraised in and as their own things in their own rights. And honestly, that seems to have mostly happened: the pfork review bears this out
Their voices aged a little too much. So much of postpunk was the youngman’s mechanical automation and nervous energy. To have actually lived a life, particularly in the face of the apocalypticism and grey world windswept [subjectivity]hellscape sort of undermines what was going on. You cant have learned too much because
I think these post post postpunk bands oughtta aim more for edwyn Collins style sketchy warbliness. Seems p reasonable as an aim to me. Yeah! especailly cause dude literally had a fucking stroke and his new album sounds more vital and immediate and contemporary and straight up young than theirs. Partly its because he never went for coolness, so he never had to shift or age, but just the energy in the band puts him across.
Beets sound like growlers or nodzzz or black lips—conspicuous pseudo pseudoanti ‘hipstar situationzzx’
Reading rainbow kind of like heavenly. Also pfork closing line about comfort and joy in the face of witchhouse and icy dubstep is dece writing because it justified this album to me beyond being instantnostalgic or tired in a post bestcoast world. Welp laid, sars!
[2/6/11; also, i cleaned up some typos and inserted pertinent links when necessary for understanding]
[it's fucking weird to see stuff i wrote for myself because i wanted to record my thoughts published on a blog. not sure how i feel about it. gonna call it a day and come back to it--reappraise the impulse--later. think certainly i would need to reprocess my content more heavily if i were to make a habit of publication: add visual interest and soforth. might be more hassle than it's worth, and i begin to squirm a little when i'm universally appraisable--i mean, that's not to suggest i think anybody would read or pay attention, but all the same, once it's out there it's out there]
George w bush and ape symbology as a fear of losing our cultivation? Protofascist authoritarian vs overcultivated immoral slow stodgy inefficient futurism. Competing science fictions, rejection of the next generation’s federation. Then he didn’t do anything because a stupid ape has no need to address the economy of technology imploding, then springing into brutal grim Christian action of pretense to burn away the corruption in the inexplicable and foul east. We will crush out this filth, it has assaulted our core, our soul, our symbols.
The inversion of generation x; they could hardly be relied on as a countercultural force because they were trained into nonexistence and apathy, fading into references and implacable early-internet ‘coolness’. Y as the response to x’s quiet conservatism and growing-upness. More extreme nihilism with cool quietude via the potential and ease for overexpression and showmanship on the internet. Gaudiness writ titanic, aesthetic nothingness. Minimalism and breadth, effortless and unnecessary information, unspoken obviousness in all facts and things, a mere check for the same bullet points. The absurdity being, of course, that it works. This is just the most efficient way to develop our collective subjectivities; end-stage individuality/ism.
i haven't posted anything on here for like nine months, preferring instead to keep all my 'useless and pointless knowledge' to myself in an ever-expanding library of word documents i scrawl into with inexplicable verve when the muse possesses me. seriously, like i could sustain a blog for months with judicious rationing of my extant content alone.
the issue, though, with my writing is that i overauthor, that i cannot separate my Self from my work, that otherwise impersonal concepts become inextricable from the deeply personal thought processes and neuroses that framed and generated them.
what i'm gonna do, though, i guess, is post at random intervals things that i've written that i'm comfortable with making universally available. i think i'll probably make a note of the date of composition, so as to place the work within my human timeline.
don't know if i'm gonna stick with it, but i happened upon a brief piece i wrote a week or two ago that was fairly impersonal and self-contained while still providing 'valuable insights' into 'things', and i figured i may as well 'blog that fucker'.
a note on my style: overdense, difficult to read through, sometimes willfully obtuse or obscure, so caught up in finding the intuitively perfect phrase or word that it often makes sense only to me or remains unfinished, the lightning failing to strike.
i have a longstanding metaphor of creativity as masturbation--which is both insightful and offputting--and that honestly helps frame the way i write. alone, often in the dim, possessed by a need or desire that seems deeper than the mind, that springs from an almost biological truth... and you start to see why the metaphor is so attractive and ubiquitous to me.
anyway, republished content follows in three, two,
is pretty fucking great, why did i not know this already? its really really obviously a huge influence on morrissey as a dude (as pertains the literary bent and the detached aloofness and elevation from the work that you see in a certain type of songwriter that i tend to enjoy, same vein as like the first belle and sebastian album or i guess jens lekman a little? i also just listened to those two things in the last month or two) and totally in line with like the entire 80s, like they [ultravox] invented a lot of them[the 80s] i think .
literally cant even try and trace all the influence coming off this thing, ahead and behind, the prospect itself is a lil exhausting. major kraftwerk shit, but with all guitars and such
also western promise makes me think a lot of rush in a funny way. not gonna listen to more rush to see if thats a legit reference, though
got nothin else to say about it, its just a good album and im gonna continue to listen to it
heres a picture of it: the cover is also a decadal universal without even thinking about it, like i think maybe right as the 80s started people kind of just knew what to do with them and it got muddled by things actually happening, cause they had just had the 70s for 10 years and it was so bullshit and postmodern and acidic(in the sense of corrosive) there was a millenial-almost fresh starting impulse
further reading/consumption/you may also enjoy because it is also good and similar as an idea of constituting a backbone for postpunk-almost synth-type 80s content : the minimal wave tapes
also i listened to the first two harry nilsson albums today and they both ruled, i thought 'you cant do that', in which he spouts a ton of beatles lines all together, was funny as hell. gonna look into some more nilsson, bro has won me over wholly.
on a serious musical roll; listened to some of/ing to now scritti politti's cupid and psyche 85 and it reminded/s me a lot of like michael jackson and prince, was/is good/very compelling as what it is, but almost offputting in how sort of masterminded it seemed, like a little bit of the same deal as how perfect cocaine pop music fleetwood mac rumours is(though in scritti politti's case in light of the marxist foundations i tend to assume the craft of it is at least a little knowing--sort of a devo done straightfaced thing, a 'here is your musicproduct, it is the song you would like to spend money on so as to continue to circulate value around and function our mutual social structures i am emphasizing my shoulders because it indicates that i exist physically and take up an amount of lateral space' like the cover of xtc's go 2) [this is one of my favorite album covers. it is also what i meant about how cool xtc was in its earlier form, before it got all 'getting hugs from my brain all the time']
--i make the rumours coke70spop reference because i saw the vh1 thing about that album and the bro who stevie nicks was married to or whatever--lindsey graham?--was really obviously on some total "fuuuuck this is exactly the way these instruments sound and are sounding and they fit together to make this song in this particualr way and shit goddamn this is the song i just made it done"
[post-scriptually-created intro-note: p apparent, but i wrote this stream-of-content as i listened to the album]
ive tried a bunch of time to listent o and like this album, and I think that now ive listened to the other 80s things—psych furs and suchlike---I can
Partridge is funny cause he lsot his shitsnd started just writing like ‘be happy fuck yeah ungh be ok ‘ because he was a brittle aging out of youth bro instead of a ‘society is FUCKED ,man, angry young man like graham parker/joe Jackson.
I like the multiplied, wheeeew weeeew wwwweeeewww guitar in garden of earthly delights, the lyrics are silly in a go2 type of way. Conscious post beatles
Mayor of simpleton a take on ‘don’t know much about hsitory’. tv show song like robyn hitchcock's 'man who invented himself' but not as good a show-- i totally love that song/artist, by the way. Gay candy colored late 80s doctor who, like how sylvestre mccoy looks externally w/ the question mark motif. Good doubling of vocal, takes one of the best early elvis features and applies xtc to it. Very bouncy, cruisey
[mrrrrrr, as oswald cobblepot, im completely externally invalid, here's some knockout gas from my fuckin umbrella or some shit, i dunno]
I like the cover a lot, but I always have
Here comes president kill again is a good thing just because of the title. It eats kind o like a less good ‘dear god’, which I get, but Reagan was so easy that its shitty to shamble so Robert smith-y [I assume, only having seen the cure at coachellz 2k9 and not listened to them] horns are a good ' mancini 60s ' bit, as is low voice(good bit, that is)—makes me think of the name harry nillson, even though im not imlyng a connection.
Poor skeleton steps out is good, doing a bit of a nearly Africa sequel with the graceand bwoom, bwoom, and the ribcage xylophone. I see how this hsit soundedteletubby to me in other contexts though. If you weren’t following the 80s as a cultural thing, and rather just xtc alone, this could be a disappointment in light of the more directly abrasive and subversive emotionality of the earler work—the softening of the bearded 30s-dad type we now see as that one bald comedian in the Toyota minivan commercials
Andy partridge is kind of insufferable, but when he was cool you didn’t mind as much.
Merely a man doesn’t even have the potency of dear god’s earnest structure-and-nostalgia-refuting primacy [via childvoice]. Good jimmy swaggert namedrop though
‘help me get through my cynical days/these cynical days’ shut up man that’s dumb ‘its justa passing phase’ ‘years go by’ its like the damn late enlightenment, all ‘eugh the countryside ruled, peasants, shit yeah’ but that is even cool because its part of a grnd tradition that in that context turned into pastoral romanticism, which rules on both countries’ fronts—us and Britain
across ths antheap is pretty good. I like the guitar behind the vocal and the ssynths. I also like the way he growls ‘orgasms fade’ because that’s what he shouldve gotten out of the 80s, I really think andy partridge shouldve gone more directly sexual in response to that decade than he did, but I guess breakdowns are pretty unsexy, so he got at what was happening via emotion rather than moralizing, based as it is in the self rather than, y’know, not.
It is one of the better songs on the album, fosh
Whoop; ‘hold me my daddy’ damn it partridge your perspective is not cool, I really wish you hadn’t freaked out so goddamn hard. ’It hurts to see grown men fighting this way’, like I get that antiwar is a thing, generals and majors and all, but that was based in the subjects, like jello biafra’s songwriting a little, whereas this is all navelgazy in a tiresome way. That’s even a cool African guitar thing with the vocals there after the fake ending, legit pre-vampweekend/postgraceland exploitation, but it doesn’t save the lyrical issues
Pink thing is good. Its really funny as a dick joke/infant conflation, that’s a good use of yr talents, andy, and also it has all the good guitar work and jaunty handclaps andfalsettos you could want. Another false ending/shift for a fadeout
Miniature sun isn’t that interesting right after pink thing, bit of a steely dan supertramp thing. ‘vain little boy I was’ nah man, youre just creating a narrative of personal growth via crisis when your coolest shit was what you lost in the breakup
Chalkhills and children is a good song too, doing a very convincing brian Wilson, esp on the fadeout
IN CONCLUSION NOW THAT THE ALBUMS OVER:
Decent, not the best work, Stephen Thomas erlewine at allmusic doesn’t get patridge in the same way I do, the best parts of skylarking were the unexpected and emotionally off, twitchy elements, like he says‘grass’ is purely a positive song, and ‘big day’ is a celebration of marriage, which is completely inexplicable to me. Actually allmusic has always bugged me re: xtc, because the other bro who reviewed the earler albums panned go2 and gave white music 3 stars and a 1 paragraph dismissal, which is shitty to do. Like drums and wires is good, yeah, but like white music at least is fantastic in the same way ultravox!’s ha! ha! ha! is. Course I never liked post-foxx ultravox anyway, gonna have to give at least Vienna another shot bc I like the title track at least—‘it means nothing to me’ with that piano thing is really great. Also gonna have to deal w/scritti politti on its own terms(ie outside the 'early material' political-ass thing i got) via cupid and psyche certainly and white bread black beer maybe—that one just bc I like ‘dr abernathy’ a lot, though ‘boom boom bap’ and the ‘middle-aged guy in his kitchen’ of it make me wary of it.
Oranges and lemons iss gonna get added to my ipod, it has finally won me over as much as it can, I think.
