0.28.1 - Talkin' 'bout a revolution sounds like a whisper
I was on the phone to my boss this afternoon, with whom I discuss weekend plans and talk about music every Friday, and when I mentioned to him that I was taking both of my nieces to see Billie Eilish this weekend, he asked me if I could find a point of comparison for him, which I struggled with. While genre is a terrible construct of our need to put things into boxes, it is useful when you're trying say "it kind of sounds like this" to someone, but in the case of Billie Eilish, I found it hard to even pick a genre to slide her music into. Too muted and quiet to be pop, but too electro to fit into the singer/songwriter mould, not loud or raucous enough to be rock but too low energy to be dance or electro, Billie Eilish has carved a genre where she only sounds like herself and any other point of comparison is sprinkled liberally with caveats and exceptions just to get remotely close to the real experience. In the end, we settled on Bjork, as close a comparison as I could muster up for anyone from the 1990's, but really, she exists in a small box only big enough for herself.
This also represents, outside of seeing Taylor last year, both the most money I have ever paid for a gig ticket, and the longest wait period from ticket purchase to eventual performance - in this case, fourteen months, eclipsing the year I waited for my Era's tour ticket to come due. I like Billie Eilishes music plenty, having been a fan since I first heard bad guy way back in the sunlit lands of 2019, but it possible I would not have paid three-figures each for four concert tickets way up in the bleachers of a venue I'm not wild about were it not for the niece's insistence they might physically die if they did not have the opportunity to see Billie Eilish in their home town. I wasn't willing to risk my Cool Uncle credentials, and I enjoy taking the nieces to these kind of cultural events, so tickets were procured, and I spent this week doing my homework before the gig.
While I had already made my conscious decision back in 2017 to be open to new musical experiences, to not dismiss artists just because they were popular* and to listen to new music with fresh ears each time, my experience hearing Billie Eilish initially helpfully reinforced and justified my decision. I knew who she was through cultural osmosis I guess, just enough people on the internet and TV saying her name to the point where I knew there was a popular singer called Billie Eilish and she was a woman. End of list of gleaned facts. Simultaneous to this, I heard bad guy somewhere. It might have been a movie trailer, or videogame thing, the details escape me but critically I heard this song entirely out of context of the performer. Somehow, I had the two pieces of the puzzle, the known existence of a popular singer, and the song which had propelled them to fame, but without any of the connective tissue, and I never put two and two together until eventually, as I went on a spurt of listening to new music to try and stave off my slide into irrelevance that I put on WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? only to immediately be greeted by a sing I'd been singing under my breath for three months.
Much like my conversation with my boss from earlier, I don't really know how to talk about her music, which is an issue considering that's the primary conceit of what I do here. What's the selling point, what is it that makes me think that her music stands somewhere above and to the side of most modern pop music (and I like a lot of modern pop music)? Is it the slightly downbeat edge, the kind of sotto-goth aesthetic that runs through her music? There's certainly something to that - to harken back to to my writing from last week about The Cure, there's a lot of lets call it similar energy between Billie Eilish's musical outlook and Robert Smiths; somewhere between a black depression and a wry smile. Her songs all feel like there's an idea behind them, a kind of lyrically driven writing style where it goes from concept to written word before she leans on her bother Finneas to help craft the musical elements to complement them. I've heard people say they find her sotto voce, understated singing style annoying and everyone is entitled to their own opinion but they are wrong - her vibe is her music, and everything coming with some kind of clear-voiced major chord pop star singing would ruin the atmosphere her songs are trying to create.
I've listened to WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP... dozens of times at this point. I might have listened to Happier Than Ever hundreds of times. If you released an album on or around the pandemic, like this album was, there's a good chance I listened to it on repeat for about a month as I tried to not go crazy. In many ways, it feels like the most commercial album of the three; closer to the modern pop landscape; with songs more focused on relationships, breakups, feminism and empowerment (whereas the first album was rooted in far darker themes); Happier Than Ever even has an emotionally overwrought scream-along bridge to rival Taylor Swift's Cruel Summer. But it's not a departure, not her abandoning the music which made her popular in a bid to consolidate mainstream success; instead its a more polished, lighter version of what had come before. For whatever reason it seems also to be the least popular of her three albums, in terms of fan opinion and streaming numbers; Despite being out for three years longer than HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, it only has 75% of the plays of its younger sister album. Maybe the pandemic was to blame, maybe people didn't appreciate the change in tone or sound as much, but this album is my favourite still.
Up until my copy of HAIM's i quit arrived a couple of weeks ago, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT was the last album I had purchased on CD; falling as I often do into the trap of "order my CD, get a presale code for this gig". Whether this was a reaction to what happened with Happier Than Ever or for no other reason than she felt like it, Billie Eilish returned both to her ALL CAPS ALBUM TITLE** era and her more introspective themes, as well as talking openly about her experiences as a bisexual woman dating other women, and it has been lavished with praise and accolades since its release. For some reason, it took more work for me to find the draw of this album than it did the other two, but it has definitely grown on me the most I've listened to it. Whether it was whiplash from my expectations following Happier Than Ever, or just because driving around the highlands of Scotland listening to this album isn't the optimal way to develop an appreciation for it, this is one of the few modern albums where I love to experience it in the dark, with headphones on, an no distractions. The cover of the album shows Billie falling through an impossible door into the depths of the sea, and there's an immersive quality to everything on here which loses some of its power if you are also focusing on the recipe you are cooking at the same time you are listening to it, but rewards full and focused attention.
Had I not seen her headline performance at Glastonbury on the TV last year, I might have had some doubts about how well her music would translate to a live performance. There are lots of bands I know who make great studio albums, but can't sustain that in a live environment, but she has a way of making the languid into the hypnotic, the quiet menace into rapt attention from the audience. So I'm excited to once again, for the 3rd time in 5 weeks, be making the 100 mile round trip across the misty hills of Yorkshire to the Co-op live, and get to vicariously live through the nieces and forget that I'm nearly 50 years old for a night.
* I may have to draw the line at Alex Warren, I know he's the king of internet teen pop right now but I've heard 'Ordinary' and the idea of exposing myself to a double album of songs which sound like that does not fill me with excitement.
** WHEN WE FALL ASLEEP was all caps album title, all lowercase song titles; Happier Than Ever has traditional capitalisation for both album title and song titles, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is all caps for both album and song titles which makes me feel like Billie Eilish is shouting at me every time I look down the track list. "This one is called LUNCH" she yells at me from the other side of the river that runs between us. All I ask for is for people to pick a style and stick to it, is that so wrong?
