ready for a fall

To whatever readers I have,

Sorry about the lack of updates around here. I thought it would be easier to start and maintain a blog during winter break, when I have nothing to do, but what I’ve found is that winter break just brings all intellectual and physical activity to a grinding halt in order to make room for tons and tons of socializing, sleeping, and eating. I think I’ll be much more inclined to write and post when I’m back at school and back in the swing of things.

In any case, this isn’t any of the posts promised last time, it’s more of an emergency alert that the new Hot Chip record is, just like their previous two full-lengths, truly great. “Made in the Dark” is yet another album that is in turns playful and morose. The beats and grooves are airtight as always, and the group maintains their proclivity for both buzzing, galvanizing hooks and elegiac swaths of delicate melody. The electronic attack that seizes “Shake a Fist” halfway through is a definite highlight, but the group really hits their stride with the “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love.” The track continues the strain of agonized, cracked balladry that they perfected with “Crap Kraft Dinner,” the thematic centerpiece of their debut LP “Coming on Strong,” and continued with “Look After Me” on 2006’s “The Warning.”

“We’re Looking for a Lot of Love” is all funereal organ, tape hiss, digitally clipped falsetto choir, and soft percussion as its throbbing melody kicks in. Vocalist Alexis Taylor plods through the first verse, hushed and sullen, before skittering beats and plucked guitar notes anticipate the lovely chorus: “Every time that we walk the streets/ I try my best to keep up with the beat/ You’re everything that I never could keep/ I hear the sound and it starts to repeat.” These words, and their attendant massive synth washes, fade into a sea of pristine whistling. The song’s muted beats get ever more tangled as the song’s form repeats and finally drifts into a sparse, bleak bridge before returning to the hook, plaintive and resigned as ever.

This chorus beautifully describes the way music is not so much a metaphor for love and life as its completely inseparable fabric. I’ve always loved Hot Chip’s first record for the way that it drapes itself in vacant, seemingly ironic references to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, yet uses these as a motif to a channel a dark yet gently humorous (and very ’00s) brand of youthful malaise. “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love,” then, is a song that strips this technique of its pop-cultural baggage to its skeletal, desperate truth.

The song is remarkable, an early contender for the finest on the record, and may yet eclipse the immaculately idiosyncratic beauty of 2005’s “From Drummer to Driver” to become Hot Chip’s single greatest track. Yet the whole album, and really the band’s whole catalog, is an embarrassment of riches. More tuneful and more willfully addictive than really anything in the mainstream, Hot Chip nonetheless defy the “pop” categorization — their music is too rich with surprises and wrinkles in places that radio pop never hides its eccentricities. Yet to call them “indie” would be a precarious and possibly embarassing choice for any band of the last 5 years working within that label, since none of them could ever dream of getting anywhere close to this level of invention, playfulness, and general excellence. Utterly unique and relentlessly delightful, Hot Chip have cranked out yet another LP of evidence that they are, far and away, the funniest, finest, and most prescient band of the 2000s.

as the pavement whirls

Pleased to see that the Magnetic Fields’ new record “Distortion” is a complete return to form. Stephin Merritt had always drawn upon showtunes and standards for his lyrics and for the construction of his songs, mastering their craft and manipulating it to dizzyingly virtuosic effect, yet his sonic mise-en-scene was generally an indie synth-pop, at once both frail and dense, sourced in records like The Human League’s “Dare” and the ABBA catalogue. On 2004’s “i,” a career nadir, Merritt outlawed synths and turned to a largely acoustic sound which allowed him to explore his affection for the classic songwriting of the early and middle part of the century. This proved a quite lacking backdrop for the tangled web of humor and misanthropy which traditionally colored Merritt’s songs, resulting in a record that sounded unpleasant and showcased some of the man’s most anemic songwriting to date (yet being a Stephin Merritt record about half the songs were still timeless gems).

“Distortion” is something else entirely. The record taps the far richer aural fields of the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain, draping a fine set of songs from Merritt in layers of guitar squall and thunderous echo.

My favorite of the resultant tracks is, of course, a nastly blast of East Coast ressentiment entitled “California Girls,” which complains of the vapid, skinny bimbos that East-Coasters like Merritt (and myself) ridiculously presume to constiute about 94% of the population of the Golden State. “They breathe coke and they have affairs with each passing rock star,” seethes the tune’s narrator, though the blow is softened by Merritt’s decision to have his sweet-voiced drummer, Claudia Gonson, sing the song. Of course, the “blow” in question becomes deliciously literal in the song’s gory climax, in which Merritt pledges, “I have planned my grand attacks/ I will stand behind their backs/ With my brand new battle-axe/ I’ll make them taste my wrath/ They will hear me say/ As the pavement whirls/ I hate California Girls.” For someone who famously wrote “69 Love Songs” (and in reality he’s written at least a hundred more), Merritt remains a fantastic poet of loathing, and “California Girls” can be slotted alongside “Yeah! Oh Yeah” and “The Desperate Things You Made Me Do” as one of his best hate songs.

“Please Stop Dancing,” a Merritt-Gonson duet, is another highlight. Its simple lyrics and addictive melody don’t hinder its pointed rendering of the psychic agony of love lost. “I’ll Dream Alone” is not only one of Merritt’s finest lyrical showings but one of his greatest vocal performances, as he perfectly handles the epic grandeur of his melody even as it is awash in, well, distortion.

The album prompted a long-overdue trawl through the Merritt back-catalogue, the Magnetic Fields having been far and away my favorite band in high school. I discovered that my teenage glee has hardly worn off, and am completely restored in my firm conviction that Merritt stands as a peer among every great pop songwriter living or dead. It’s a travesty, really, that he’s never wriggled his way out of what he himself once described as “the indie rock ghetto.” His is a genius powerfully, almost sickeningly unfit to be mentioned in the same breath as Sufjan Stevens and Of Montreal. These meditations on songwriting genius returned me to one of my favorite of my own pieces of music writing, my review of Christine Fellows’ “Paper Anniversary.” I’ll post it shortly mostly to prepare for a grand revision of nearly every concept I introduced in it, though before I do that I will be very unnecessarily throwing in my two cents on Britney Spears’ “Blackout.” ‘Til next time.