0.26.0 - I can't speak French, so I'll let the funky music do the talking (Week 26 Wrapup)

This Week: Foreign language recommendations, Lorde, Beth Gibons, a weird A Perfect Circle album and The Sounds.

I'm not a natural linguist;  you could argue I'm not a natural anything apart from blonde (and even these days it's more like someone dipped me in a muddy puddle streaked with grey than the golden blonde I was when I was younger) - rarely has there been a skill, trait or party trick I haven't had to practice endlessly in order to get to a baseline level of competency*, and languages are the things I struggle with the most.  When my parents went to live in Spain, I became so embarrassed not being able to speak to the people they shared a village with that I signed up for an 8 month course in Spanish at Chesterfield College (Spanish for Business Travellers).  A year later, armed with my new knowledge I flew back to Spain only to discover that all of my practice was useless in the face of the Extrameños accent -where they speak incredibly quickly, drop the ends of all their word pronunciations and run all their sentences together like punctuation is a luxury only for city folks - and I could not understand or communicate with any more fluency than I could the year before.  In the meantime, having arrived in Spain with no prior Spanish knowledge, my Dad had a passing command of Spanish which had taken him about two months to cultivate.  

My partner Catherine is also a linguist, a languages teacher, and someone who learns new languages for fun.  It's incredibly impressive to witness - I'm always taken aback when she switches effortlessly between Spanish and English when it often takes me significant thinking time to construct a sentence I am remotely confident is correct**.  She has been learning Japanese for 3ish years now, and she'd tell you she's not very good but let me be clear, when we were in Japan she had conversations in Japanese with native speakers and I'm really not sure how much better you need to be than that.

You might be wondering if I have forgotten that this is ostensibly a music blog and just completely lost my mind, but it's all connected;  because through meeting Catherine, who had been studying at the University of Sheffield languages department and teaching there, I met Andy.  We recently had a small gathering where the now very disparate group of friends we've meshed together had the "how do you all know each other" conversation, and it gets pretty convoluted, but my connection to Andy is pretty simple - I was dating Catherine, Catherine was living with her housemate Ben, who was working with Andy in the Languages department at the University, and Ben liked to play the board game Carcassonne, and so Andy, Ben and Catherine would play regularly and at one of those sessions Catherine brought me along.  The first time I met Andy we played Settlers of Catan in the kitchen of what would become mine and Catherine's shared rental house when we moved in together, starting a trend of us playing board games together on a Sunday evening which has lasted more or less to this day.  I was incredibly fortunately to meet Andy like I did - not only do we have a wide range of common interests, he and his partner are incredibly gracious, sociable and delightful to spend time with.  Outside of a small number of my Chesterfield associates and Catherine, Andy is probably one of the people I've known for the longest, nearly 18 years at this point.  He has, like many of the people in my social circle now (as I work to make myself feel as inadequate as possible by comparison to my peers), an incredible command of languages and is as sharp a mind and ruthless a game player as I have ever met.  When my colleagues ask me if I always win whenever I play board games, I shake my head sadly and say "You should see the sharks I play with".

Andy, like everyone I asked, has a unique cultural perspective which I knew would inform his musical recommendations;  he has lived and studied overseas, immersed himself in European and Scandinavian culture and I went to him specifically because I knew I would get stuff that I would never have found on my own.  So this week, I spent the time to listen to (most of) his recommendations.

Before I talk about any of the albums in detail, I should say/reiterate (as this is something I touched on when I foolishly let Catherine choose a bunch of albums for me as well on a road trip) that so much of the way I connect to music initially is linguistic.  If my fundamental belief that music is the format in which we can express and see reflected back at ourselves our emotional experience as human beings, it's a significant intensifier of that understanding if the words being used are meaningful to the person hearing them.  That's not 100% a barrier to entry though - when Matt Berninger from The National sings "You and your sister live in a lemonworld / I want to sit in and die / you and your sister live in a lemonworld / doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo" does that fact that those words are ostensibly in English enhance my understanding of the emotional core of the song, or are they just words which fit a useful syllable count for the song they wrote?  

So, I'm missing the easy hook, the clever turn of phrase or emotionally charged bridge you can project your own emotions onto.  In turn, that means I have to try harder to appreciate the genre and performance, which is an interesting challenge in itself.  Here's how I got on.

First, a general apology, because this might be my most reductionist article ever as I compare bands to other bands.  It feels like a lazy cheat, but one of the things I did think about during this is the way in which I assume the genre touchstones for a variety of musical styles are the English language performers in those styles; and how if I were a native German / French / Spanish / Swedish /Japanese speaker I might more obviously associate a genre of music with the band I which first performed it in my native language, so when I make these reductive comparisons, please don't think I'm in any way suggesting these are lesser or second class incarnations of that style of music just because I heard it performed in English first. 

Tocotronic presented an immediate puzzle for me, because Es ist egal, aber stays on its toes from song to song, daring me to find a single point of comparison.  My initial thought was just to classify it as a German take on Punk, but it's really not that apart from in the parts where it definitely is.  Sometimes is punk in a kind of Sex Pistols way, sometimes its Punk in the same way that early 2000s bands like The Vines were punk, sometimes its punk in the way that some of the more confrontational Nirvana songs are punk;  sometimes it veers hard into Pavement-esque lo-fi, especially towards the back half of the album.  It's pretty hard to pin down, but at the same time has enough of an style to not feel like it's four bands playing different genres on the same record.  Almost universally every song on there is 3 minutes or less, so you never have a chance to get bored or comfortable.  I have no knowledge of what the early 2000s German Indie Punk scene was;  were there so many musical styles unrepresented that Tocotronic could just straddle across all of them, or is this indicative of some kind of European musical fusion which never crossed over into the mainstream?  My no-research guarantee means I'll never really know the answers to the questions I am posing, and even though the language barrier means I'm not likely to go back to Tocotronic for a second listen, it was genuinely interesting to listen to and try and deconstruct.

If Tocotronic were a surprise, Wir Sind Helden and their album Die Reklamation was unexpected in the way in which it was so entirely inside my wheelhouse.  When I was listening to Metric's Old World Underground Where Are You Now and Live Through This, so were Wir Sind Helden; but not enough to sound derivative, and infusing their entire album with more of a prominent electrobeat feel (which reminded me in no small part of Freezepop and their Freezepop Forever album which I'm going to have to listen to again this week).  If Metric and Freezepop were fired at each other in the supercollider at CERN, the resulting sound would, I imagine, be a lot like this album.  It's really great, the music is upbeat and driving and its got an edge to it.  I would imagine that if I spoke German or they sang in English, this might be a new entry to the eternal rotation of albums that pass my own personal musical high bar.  It might still do that, despite the language barrier, and that's not easy to pull off.

It's entirely possible Andy had me listen to Det gör ont en stund på natten men inget på dan to improve my knowledge of what the ALT codes for European special characters are.  Lena Phillipsson has a self titled album, he could have had me listen to instead but no, it's more important that I learn that ALT+0229 gets you an a with a stupid circle over it.  Again, we're in the no research zone but my strong suspicion is that Lena Phillipsson is Swedish based on the song titles (and having had a Swedish boss I'm slightly more tuned into to what Swedish looks like without comprehending a single word), and if she's Swedish, and she sounds like she does, and Andy recommended her, it's an almost certainty that she represented Sweden at Eurovision at some point.  Like I mentioned in my write up about Eurovision, Sweden are powerhouses of electropop song writing and this album sounds exactly like that.  Don't mistake that for criticism, making good pop music is hard and this album has a lot of good pop music on it.  Musically, I think I liked it more than the Loreen album I listened to this year but that could just be recency bias; the problem I was always going to have with this album was the language barrier - more than anything, comprehension feels so key to pop music that the tracks can't find anything to hang onto in my mind apart from slick production and a party atmosphere.  Still fine, still better than a lot of pop music I've heard, just held at arms length by the issues of comprehension between us.

The last album Andy recommended to me (apart from a Musical OST and I have several of those in various lists I need to cover so I'll probably do them all at the same time) was Dying To Say This To You.  As has become apparent to me over the course of the last 6 months, the pace of new music being produced is breakneck, and expecting to be able to keep up with stuff in a world where the most common methods for people to unexpectedly hear new music are tv theme tunes and inconsiderate people playing music out loud on public transport seems like an impossible ask.  I've never heard The Sounds before this week, had no idea who they were, and I was still out at nightclubs and listening to new music in 2006 so somehow, we just never made a connection.  

Have you ever experienced a wave of familiarity for something you've never heard before?  I listened to this entire album feeling like I knew these songs, and desperately trying to place them, like the answer to a quiz question on the tip of my tongue.  It wasn't until quite far through the album that I realised the problem was that it wasn't one reductive comparison I was reaching for, but two.  Strip the vocals out, and you realise how directly in the lineage of This Is It by The Strokes this sounds.  That's not a bad thing, NME said that album was better than Pet Sounds so really that's high praise.  The vocal performance and style was leading me astray - that, in turn, went through the big mental sorting machine in my head and eventually landed on Republica as the thing I was thinking of, but it's not a long walk to realise they in turn are the products of performers like Joan Jett and Siouxsie and the Banshees.  None of this is a criticism, and I liked the whole album and still can't figure out how I've never heard of them until now; I guess there were a lot of jagged guitar indie rock bands in the early 2000s and you had to do something very special to rise above the pack.

With Andy's recommendations ticked off (thanks Andy), what else did I listen to this week?

I've talked at length about my love for the first two Lorde albums;  about how incredibly she managed to produce a pair of albums which so starkly capture a kind of time/place/experience/state of mind combined with musical interpretation of signature and rhythm which feels like trying to work out the dimensions in an M.C. Escher picture***.  She had a new album come out this week, so this seemed an appropriate time to cover the now two remaining albums of hers I'd not already listened to.

There's a Taylor Swift quote from her NPR Tiny Desk concert which I'm going to reference here.  It's between songs, and in introducing Death by a Thousand Cuts she says this:-

"So, over the course of the years that I've done interviews, which is I think probably about 15 or 16 years now, I've gotten a question over and over again which I think has the potential to seriously deteriorate my mental health.   The question is 'What will you ever do if you get happy?"

Does great music always have to come from trauma?  I don't think so, and there are examples on examples of timeless, powerful music that explores ideas and themes outside of the intensely personal.  But sometimes the personal is what gives you the fire, drives you to new heights of expression and then with it comes fame and success and maybe you meet a new love interest and dip off on an island somewhere and feel a sense of contentment.  Those are the circumstances in which you might make an album like Solar Power, and in turn you might struggle to generate the same enthusiasm for that music as you did for the darker, edgier material from before.  The disaffected youth, making ends meet and careering headfirst into carcrash relationships while looking with distrust at the world the prior generation has built around them - that's the perspective I find engrossing.  Happy, contented successful young musician enjoys being happy and successful and has thoughts about nature and our place in it?  Less so, and so Solar Power never really landed with me.  I do like Stoned In The Nail Salon but I've tried so hard to like the rest of this album and it just doesn't work for me as much.

The good news for me, and the bad news for Lorde I guess, is that Virgin feels like an album with something to say again;  frustrated and expressive again, I've listened to this album three times since Friday and I want to keep going back again.  It doesn't have an immediate radio-friendly hook like Royals or Green Light (thought What Was That stuck in my head) the whole album feels like new ground to explore at the moment, which is very exciting.  

On a quick sidenote, I was highly amused when putting the tessellated image together to discover that obviously someone at Spotify had decided that Lorde's crotch shot was too explicit and the art has a 'tasteful' solar flare applied to it.  I suspect she has feelings about that given the album art for Virgin and the art book that comes with it (if you know, you know).

Considering this is only eight albums this week, this has been one of my longer wrap ups.  On a side note, because my audience is limited and my time is precious, I'd much rather take the time to finish writing a thing totally before publishing it, so sometimes you'll get a weekend wrapup on a Monday if I had a lot to say about the stuff from the week before.  Fortunately for everyone, these last two albums will be far briefer in scope.

Netrunner player and all round good egg (and my final ever competitive Netrunner tournament opponent at UK Games Expo UK Nationals in 2017) Tom Lane published a playlist of songs from Glastonbury performers this weekend**** which included a song from Out Of Season, an album by Portishead's Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man (the bassist from UK band Talk Talk) which I love.  I'll talk more about Portishead when I cover their discography for the blog, but Beth Gibbons has such an incredible voice that putting it alongside acoustic guitars and understated instrumentation just makes it stand out more.  This album sounds like the saddest, sexiest folk festival you could ever imagine and I hold it in huge regard.

While we've more or less managed to maintain the base level of terrible in world events without them getting appreciably worse since last week, that doesn't mean I haven't thought about them, which in turn reminded me that eMOTIVe existed for a strange reason.  I'm a TOOL fan and an A Perfect Circle fan but this album is kind of a misguided disaster in my opinion.  Released as an anti-war/anti-oppression album during the Bush era, the plan was to cover a bunch of songs which talked about the political climate back then, it contains some incredibly misguided covers of Imagine, What's Goin' On? and When the Levee Breaks amongst others.  Songs, all time great songs, important songs deserve respect and even though Gal Godot jumped on the grenade of having released the worst cover of Imagine in the grand span of all human history, Maynard probably owes her a fruit basket for taking that title from him.  However, in the middle of the album is the single original song, Passive, an exhortation for people to rise against oppression or a song about Maynard's feelings about his mother's lengthy comatose state at the time*****.  Its a great song, one of A Perfect Circle's best, and it languishes here, trapped on an album where A Perfect Circle try and add their own special flavour to (What's So Funny About) Peace Love and Understanding.  The mind boggles.

OK, that's it.  I am done writing and its too hot for me to think any harder than I already have.  I'm off to see Olivia Rodrigo tomorrow so probably a little mini-article on her stuff and possibly an article on a musical tangent I got sent down this weekend and feel compelled to write about.  That's if the heatstroke doesn't get me first.

Stay safe out there.

* Case in point - one of the things I can do is spin a pen between my fingers, which I decided I wanted to learn to do because I saw Val Kilmer do it in Top Gun.  I can now do that, but all that took was me doing it endlessly in every lesson I was in in school and college and every meeting I've been in where I've had a pen to hand and spending hours of my life apologising for accidentally launching a pen from my hand to the other side of the room.  The net benefit I've gained from doing this is I now do it compulsively in meetings where I have a pen in my hand and people generally watch me for a second then ask me to stop because it's distracting.  Time well spent.

** In Madrid we visited some friends of Catherine's who were very lovely and gracious hosts, but spoke no English.  My Spanish understanding is better than my ability to speak it, so I was following the conversation vaguely, to the point where I felt I had enough vocab to contribute something in Spanish.  By the time I had constructed the sentence in my head and spoke it out loud, the conversation had moved on so much from what I was referring to I had to explain to Catherine what I was trying to reference and have her explain it back to her friends.  Mortifying.

*** Catherine has asked me several times if I can play any Lorde songs on my drum kit.  While I know there is an incredible and limited number of musicians who are have developed the skills to play drum machine breakbeats and the like in real life, I am not those people.  The things she does with the drum machine programming feel like you need 5 arms and 2 brains to try and play what we will laughably describe as the groove in most of her songs.  We watched her Glastonbury set this weekend and I took great pleasure in pointing out that while she had a live band, there was no live drummer willing to take the job on.

**** You would think I would use the Glastonbury Festival as a useful thematic wrapper to write about some albums this week but I'm off to the Tramlines festival here in Sheffield in two weeks time and I am going to do that then instead.

***** Art is interpretation, delete as applicable, I think the first one is probably the intended reading but I find it hard to not think the latter is the truer interpretation.