Indie Trends: Melodic Volatility (June 2011)
By Chris Polley
There’s more than one reason why Orson Welles chose a shattered snow globe for that infamous shot of Citizen Kane in which we find out the true meaning of Kane’s dying final words. The surface level analysis tells us that the snow globe rather literally represented that earlier scene in the film in which a young Charlie was still innocent and laughing, blissfully unaware of the totality of pain and suffering the world had yet to offer him. Sledding in the snow was equated with happiness in the strictest of manners to help us, the viewers, come to a very straightforward path of understanding the exquisitely shot visuals of Kane’s jubilance as a child versus his brokenness as an aging and belligerent man. But how is it, then, that something so ugly, regardless of how truthful a parable it may be about the dangers of power and ego, could be considered so beautifully rendered, so meticulously photographed and edited? Because when that snow globe broke, I didn’t just comprehend its significance; I felt it as well.
Sometimes the same conundrum comes about in the best music as well, especially as generations have come and gone in popular music and genre lines can be blurred, dissembled, and shoddily rebuilt in a way that is both soul-crushing and inarguably gorgeous. Enough time has passed that punk rockers can utilize technical proficiency to the best of their ability and create epic 18-track records that include far more than anti-establishment posturing and three-chord sloppiness. Enough years have gone by that pop songs don’t have to be drenched in cleanliness and sharp, crisp tones; they can still throb brilliantly with accessible melody while fraying the edges in honest but destructive rhetoric, simultaneously embracing and rebelling against the childhood memories that are so perfect and yet also so damning. And certainly enough back and forth between the sub-sects of hip hop, rap, and spoken word (not to mention the death of one of their progenitors in Gil Scott-Heron) that we can throw all the embittered bastardizations of these movements in the garbage while still allowing those best in the field to repurpose it and surprise us all over again, reminding us of its more spellbinding albeit conflicted qualities.
Fucked Up “A Little Death” David Comes to Life [Matador]
Let us start first with a band that has decided to over time, seemingly deliberately, imbue more and more melody to their long-standing volatility (I understand that their name may make this introductory statement a bit unnecessary) rather than coming out of the gate like that (like the next artist in this edition of Indie Trends) or doing the opposite, injecting more and more volatility into the melody (like the final artist discussed below). Three albums in, I would like to conjecture that these rough-neck Canadians finally found their voice. Many would disagree, citing the punks’ critically-acclaimed sophomore record (and Polaris Music Prize-winning) The Chemistry of Common Life as the perfect marriage of hardcore thrust and inviting warmth, and while I fully respected that record’s ability to work in shoegaze guitar theatrics with violent vocal cord shredding, I never got that “snow globe” feeling from this band until their latest, David Comes to Life, came blaring through my speakers last month.
Measured logic would reason that I’m simply too much of a wuss to have thoroughly enjoyed their past work, and that maybe even that the band’s gotten a little soft after getting so much recognition for softening their sound a bit for the masses. Funnily enough, though, I have yet to see a single reviewer argue that the band’s lost their touch by expanding their anthemic ability across an entire record, with almost every interlocking piece of every song having some kind of raucous yet interminably celebratory backbone behind it. These songs haven’t lost anything – they’ve only gained a more assured and riotous spirit. There’s simply too much fun being had for any sourpuss punk purist to write the band off as sell-outs or aging weaklings getting too much in touch with their heartstrings. Sure, it’s political, as it’s allegedly a concept record about living in England circa the Margaret Thatcher administration, but maybe it’s good that singer/screamer Damian Abraham is largely unintelligible amongst the ebullient guitar riffs and vivid percussion, because that might sour this wide-as-fuck smile that’s currently on my face, despite this being my umpteenth listen through the lengthy hour-plus record.
WU LYF “Dirt” Go Tell Fire to the Mountain [L Y F]
Just like the snow globe falling to its demise and the lack of clarity amongst the lyrics of David Comes to Life, words simply do not matter when it comes to WU LYF. In fact, the Manchester quartet might even be of the belief that words and knowledge does more harm than good in an era where everybody wants everyone to know everything about them with the ease of a click of the forefinger. Only one album old and they’re as hard to find information about as their lyrics are to decipher, despite there being a whole lot less yelling going on than in the previous record covered above. Wikipedia’s own entry on the band has allegedly been deleted by their associates and/or themselves on numerous occasions, and they’re notorious for evading interviews and press contact in general. How this mythology plays into the experience of listening to their music is curious (beyond the afore-hinted-at blurry use of warbling vocals – see last month’s feature, while you’re at it), but not without its fair share of clues in the melody and atmosphere alone.
Not unlike seminal records by more social American bands like Wilderness and Wolf Parade (with WU LYF I think it’s safe to say we’ve finally uncovered the W-trifecta of epic and warbling pop-rock bands with keyboards), Go Tell Fire to the Mountain works in two alternate ways throughout its running time. The first is as an airy and almost precious soundscape that washes over the listener like a pleasant sheen with an aching past. It doesn’t sound completely well-worn, what with its intentionally amateurish production values, but it certainly does feel timeless. It comes across as at once primitive and almost improvisational, like a very lucky jam session that went just right, and you were just glad to sit there in front of the musicians with eyes closed and tapping a palm on your knee. Listen closely enough, however, to the ebbs and flows of the overly emotional guitar tickles, or to the grooving but moving bass lines, or most potently, to the deliriously affected vocal howls and growls, and suddenly what at first seemed like a nascent cinematic score becomes a piercing and priestly mess of human expression. Take it all in concurrently and you might be amazed at just how stunning WU LYF was able to make frustration sound.
Shabazz Palaces “Are You Can You Were You? (Felt)” Black Up [Sub Pop]
Then again, wasn’t it always music’s job to make frustration sound appealing? To turn something ugly and disjointed into something of a memorably and joyous touchstone has been popular music’s bread and butter ever since it felt good to have the blues, possibly even earlier. And then rock was created to give it some volume and chaos rather than just sadness, and it rocked some boats. And then punk spurted out of the fringes to prove that volume and chaos could marginally outweigh the melody and still be rife with humanity. And then hip hop came along from the fringes of the fringes; its leaders didn’t just feel disenfranchised by their parents and teachers – they felt disenfranchised by nearly everyone, including many that ended up enjoying their rhymes and beats. So when they wanted to get that across in their newest offshoot of the blues, they weren’t angry with amplifiers. No, they instead channeled their anger through the sounds that six-strings often overshadowed: bass and beats. Ishmael Butler, aka Shabazz Palaces, took note of the first fifteen years or so of this development when he first helped found his trio Digable Planets in the early 90s, and now that another twenty-ish years have passed, he’s deconstructing that which he helped solidify way back when.
Black Up takes these familiar vibes, utilizes that which is necessary to easily identify what Shabazz Palaces is doing as hip hop, and then smashes them into a million pieces, as if he’s as disgusted with their power as he is mesmerized by them. The instability he’s accessing here is clearly not of the same world that Digable Planets were, or even Public Enemy, but rather methodically assembled to resemble something more science-fiction than sociological fact. Even when he lets himself flow through numerous stanzas of mind-warping wordplay it’s with either some kind of buzzing or bubbly vocal effect that almost sounds accidental, or something off in the drumming like a dissipating snare that doesn’t hold the stream underneath the voice. And while this kind of purposeful production fuckery may sound maddening, not only is it kind of the point, but it also only adds to the spectacle that Butler’s attempting to make. Some have gone so far as to say that this isn’t just spectacle – it’s revolutionary. It’s been a while since someone’s said this about a hip hop record that wasn’t also self-image fodder and/or clearly produced for the masses. He’s doing it for seemingly similar reasons as Fucked Up and WU LYF: gaining a better and more emotive understanding of the bedlam of life, not gaining blind fans or train wreck spectators. It’s more Orson Welles, less Charles Foster Kane. It’s more snow globe, less Rosebud.
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