Wednesday, 15 August 2012
Lee Ranaldo Free Downloads and Streaming
Friday, 20 July 2012
Glitters Like Gold
The Cribs haven't made many concessions to the modern music industry. There have been no American accents, no fashion labels giving out lanyards at gigs, no abandonment of the bands they professed to love in their teens. Thanks to The Libertines and The Strokes, the early noughties was a good time for The Cribs to launch, as that wave of indie was decidedly in vogue - but they rejected the scene that had adopted them, denouncing the sexism in the lad-rock around them and writing the cutting tracks 'Hey Scenesters' and 'Mirror Kissers' to slate the very people that shouted their lyrics at gigs.
The slightly derisive edge didn't seem to hurt the fans' feelings though - the hipsters probably didn't regard themselves as such anyway. The Cribs were gathering momentum just as that indie scene melted away in around 2008 to make way for singer-songwriters and electro-indie of the sort peddled by Friendly Fires, White Lies and their compatriots. The Cribs released what was probably their most well-known album, Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever during the final throes of this scene, making an unexpected splash with the track 'Men's Needs', an enigmatic attack on misogyny. They'd signed to a bigger label and got Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos in to do the production, but their third album still didn't concede much to pop - the uncompromisingly angry 'Our Bovine Public' is as seething as anything on The New Fellas, and the musicianship was getting increasingly adept, Ryan's lead guitar in particular (though it had been incredibly raw in the first two albums, admittedly).
After this success, The Cribs took on another member - Johnny Marr of The Smiths, one of their principal influences. I still think this was a match made in heaven, though they got some inevitable stick from some of the fans; I saw them live for the first, second and third time during Marr's tours with the band, and enjoyed every performance - he fit right in. I felt that the addition of a second guitar enriched the atmosphere of Ignore the Ignorant too. Though the anti-Marr feeling was oddly strong, I think they came through it unscathed. Tracks like 'We Share the Same Skies', 'Emasculate Me' and 'Save Your Secrets' are as worth listening to as anything of theirs, and much more skilful than early tracks like 'The Watch Trick', which have a certain raw appeal but sound like a load of teenagers messing about with a 4-track by comparison. That's almost certainly what they were.
In the Belly of the Brazen Bull, their newest album, is the one they always wanted to make - through the thick feedback and fuzziness, you can hear Comet Gain, Sonic Youth, The Smiths - all those bands they've loved throughout their career. It may have a Smithsy touch, but Marr departed from the band this year, because - well, who knows? Marr's a musical nomad at the moment anyway, probably scared of commitment after his embittered marriage to Morrissey. The Cribs are a trio once more, and album number five gives two fingers to expectation, in that it's managed to keep the ground-roots style, but it's also got technique and cryptic but profound lyrics, and it still made it into the top ten, even without Marr.
Here's a video of them performing 'Glitters Like Gold', their new single, for Radio 1. I like this version because the vocals are more pronounced than on the recording, and it's organic - they were made to be a live band.
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Beautiful Voices
Arctic Monkeys
There's something compellingly naughty about Arctic Monkeys, even when they're not talking about little books of sex tips - something disobedient and free, even when they're being musically tame. It's got something to do with Alex Turner's voice. The richness of it against the unrelentingly Northern dialect is appealing - he can play with how much of his accent goes into his vocal line, and unlike most indie artists of the same sort, he has the technical skill to mess with the melody. 'R U Mine', Arctic Monkeys' most recent single, is a return to form for the lads. At clubs, it stands out as miles ahead of most other new tracks in that it balances simplicity with perfect production and well-judged instrumentation; it has the raw energy of their first album, but they've grown into a wilder beast since then. The video is laddish but entertaining - they're still arrogant teenagers at heart, and I suppose that's how people love them.
Marvin Gaye
He's quite a jump from Alex Turner, but variety is the spice of life - Marvin Gaye has also been making many an appearance on my iPod playlists recently. Alright, I'll tell you, it was Bridget Jones - the placement of 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough' in that film is epic, in spite of the... y'know, the rest of that film. Gaye's voice alongside that of Tammy Terrell is perfect; it's a real summer song, empowering and perfected by their lovely, smooth vocals. The video for this always cheers me up - they look so content, so relaxed. Voices like these don't need fancy footage to rack up 21,000,000 views.
On the widget below, I've also added 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' - the Slits cover is brilliant in its own way, but this surpasses it - and 'Sunny', a song my mum used to listen to when I was a child. I heard it again at a cinema, in the pre-show music, and it was so eerily familiar that I had to look it up. Turns out it's a great upbeat song.
Joan Armatrading
The last of my artists is Joan Armatrading - the wonderful 20th century star whose CD I happened upon by chance in HMV the other day. I knew of her so I thought I'd give it a try, and I struck gold. She has moments of brilliance, dipping in and out of genres. The first on the widget below is 'Opportunity', my current favourite, a bluesy number about underhanded dealing. A lot faster and funkier is 'Show Some Emotion', with which Armatrading had a hit a few decades ago. 'Like Fire' showcases some of her raw talent on the guitar - she plays with rhythmic techniques and still manages to sing over the top. As a struggling beginner, I have respect for anyone that can do that. Finally, I've put one of her slower numbers on, 'Tall in the Saddle', mostly for its first lines, and how insanely gorgeous they are against their syrupy backdrop. It breaks down a bit when she starts singing "We had fun fun fun fun", I always think the word 'fun' makes things more S Club than jazz club, but hey, she didn't know about the 90s when she wrote that line.
Thursday, 10 May 2012
No Doubt
• Women dancing, wearing bikinis, or crop-tops and little shorts, or just underwear
• Numerous women dancing around or in front of a singular male, or a small group of males
• At least one woman with less clothes on than would be deemed 'normal' or 'not slutty' in public
• Close-ups of women's bodies, usually bums, boobs, legs and stomachs.
You may come across a couple of videos without these things, but my own personal (admittedly confirmational) scan through the channels suggests it's rare, even in genres not usually reknowned for their sexism. And of course, videos differ in the level to which they use the depersonalised female body - but it's there alright, most of the time.
Anyway, I initially went on for another 4 paragraphs about why this is a bad thing, but I don't think it'd win any converts - you either get what I mean or you think it's all harmless, a bit of fun. I'm a killjoy, a jealous bitch even. I've heard it before. They're two fundamentally different stances, sure, and I'll grant that on a good day, I can sit through one of those videos emotionlessly and know that plenty of people do the same, desensitised to the images they're presented with. But I am a great believer in the idea that things seep into our psyche; we don't always see that what's 'normal' to us is not actually the only path, the only way the world could be. Music videos show a world of ideals, but those are NOT biological ideals. They are cultural ideals, and therefore, they could easily be re-shaped. They're only showing 80%-naked girls and half-dressed guys because they're perpetuating our media's images, and our media's images are there because being thin, tanned, made-up, well-dressed down to the underwear, shaven, perfumed and bejewelled is the most expensive way to live, and our media is based on advertising. Simple as that. (Well, almost...)
All this has, tangentially enough, been leading up to a discussion of No Doubt. I always used to see Gwen Stefani as another sugar-pop princess, with slightly better music, because I saw her having an interview on Channel 4 a long time ago and she appeared pretty vacuous. It was definitely a cruel assessment, I know that now, but the pretty costumes, blonde bombshell haircut and heavy make-up don't do her music justice, really. I was too used to pop producing mindless music by women who were just a front, lip-syncing, taking pin-up girl photos and grinding the camera in videos. Therefore, when I watched 'Just A Girl', it was a very pleasant surprise. The lyrics mean srsbsns, and she's got a srsbsns voice to go with them.
I hope no-one missed the sarcasm. I think it's pretty blatant but it was released in America. (No offence, Americans, but your Bible Belt makes us all lol over here in the UK.)
I'm just a girl in the world... That's all that you'll let me be!"
Sunday, 6 May 2012
Tropicalia
Friday, 20 April 2012
Where is our music?
It is obviously in the nature of a retrospective documentary to simplify a complex era, make everything seem black and white as such. The forces of conservatism and liberalism are the perpetual intertwined threads, and documentaries make it their aim to show the two clear sides of the argument - in this case, the anti-reggae mainstream and the pioneering young groups of the time, the former the voice of the past, and the latter progression. For this reason, it's easy to come to the conclusion that those grainy videos and dancing 80s teenagers with dreadlocks were not actually representative of the time - they're just one movement in a much wider social context, and the opposition were not united against them: what most programmes like that miss is the general sense of apathy felt by the majority. I doubt many housewives or farmers in 1981 really cared about Bob Marley's death.
Even then, the videos and the ideas do seem momentous: the 1980s Handworth riots happened, they represented genuine social unrest, and the music was a by-product of sentiments in the communities.
Where is our music? That's what I want to know. Where is this millenium's movement? We have social unrest - but what were the student protesters listening to? Was it really Radio 1? Where has the niche gone?
My first idea is that it's all just me. There are lots of niches that will be remembered and turned into documentaries in 20 years' time, it's just that I'm either ignorant of them or apathetic towards them. I don't care about mockney rapping or dubstep so I'm out of the loop when it comes to what will be defined as the sound of the early 21st century. Others would claim the 'scene' to be our niche, but it's pretty much one of the two mainstream options these days: as a teen, you either watch the X Factor or you dye your hair black and listen to My Chemical Romance. 'Emo' and 'scene' are as popular as many other genres.
So, I could just be blind to the decent niche that I fit into. To solve my ego-centric question of why I have to go looking abroad or into the past for music I like, I tried to think of what people of my 'sort' listen to - my age, my gender, my peergroup. I'm usually underwhelmed - it's a mixture, often, of the mainstream. Not necessarily lacking in talent, but certainly not a musical 'movement', carrying political affiliations or messages or diverging from what's gone before. For example, what Beyoncé offers isn't bad, but it isn't a way of life, it's good pop. And in my view, pop is a slowly drifting ship tied to the commercial docks, with niche genres the rowboats that sometimes find themselves on the open sea. The thrills don't come from being on board the cruise liner; that's a smooth, dull ride.
Another thought: maybe the internet is killing that kind of niche movement. Perhaps by being able to find what's going on in Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, my generation is breaking the mould; we no longer have to swarm around one genre at a time, we can stick our proboscises into all sorts across the world, and use the net to contact other lovers of our favourite genres, which is a kind of musical blood letting - it loses its charge and intensity at a particular moment because its communities are so geographically unconcentrated, and have no need to seek out peers in vivo; they have them in vitro, online.
Also, of course, there is the issue of illegal downloading: our new global method of music transmission doesn't get noticed because niche music loved by tech-literate young people is more likely to be siphoned into our Music folders from Torrentz.com than bought legitimately, so it doesn't make the charts or the bands don't sell enough to get promotion. We are killing our future documentaries, people. Do you want to be on TV or not? Stop it!
But yes. The whole thrust of today's post is this: I reckon my socio-cultural segment of this generation are the first middle-class young adults in a long time not to have a united front, musically. I have no idea if my peers are listening, en masse, to anything that the population isn't. That's at the core of it: is there any music unique to the group that I call 'us', or is it all being universalised by capitalism? We want to be original in at least a superficial way, find ourselves united as a collective (but an exclusive one, and one that listens to music we like personally). A more personal question - does that 'we' even exist? Is society losing its sharp edges, its social definition? Do I have a peer group, or am I just me?
The larger the audience, the more music has to cater for everyone to keep its fans, and so often becomes bland and the lyrics vague. I'd like to discover some music that isn't bland, something that's happening in my country, with lyrics which I can relate to, like reggae and two-tone spoke to my parents and their friends - like beat music or punk spoke to others.