Sunday, January 21st, 2007 // Paperhouse
Junior Boys — So This is Goodbye. Gentle electro-pop on this sophomore album from the group that makes the Postal Service sound decidedly out of date. Steady beats, some dub influences, and soothing male vocals make this one great for quiet afternoons.
The Knife — Silent Shout. To be honest, I was more into Deep Cuts, their previous album, but Silent Shout is slowly growing on me as a fantastic example of out-of-this-world vocals coupled with in-your-face synth attacks. It’s simultaneously beautiful and harsh.
Matmos — The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast. Sixth album from the sample-based duo. Matmos is one of the few acts right now that can be said to use “sound” as an instrument; anything that can be recorded goes. The 10 tracks each stand for a person the band admires.
Asobi Seksu — Citrus. Shoegaze-influenced pop fronted by a Japanese singer, echoing Galaxie 500 and My Bloody Valentine, but at once more sugary in its structure and melodies while still adding a hefty dose of noise explosions every once in a while.
Ellen Allien and Apparat — Orchestra of Bubbles. A truly solid release from two modern techno giants. The album fuses modern German techno trends with pop and IDM influences to create something instantly accessible and exciting. A great gateway to everything exciting about European techno right now.
Lindstrøm — It’s a Feedelity Affair. This great collection of 12-inch recordings released in the last few years combines disco and minimal influences to create infectious dance tunes.
Rex the Dog — Maximize. Not an album but a 12-inch on Germany’s Kompakt label, it was good enough to mention if only for its seriously intense synth/beat combo that will knock you down but then pick you back up and convince you that dancing could actually save lives.
Jonas Bering — Behind this Silence. A great 12-inch also on Kompakt, this is a wonderful example of how exciting minimal and ambient house can be. Best enjoyed with a clear head early in the morning.
Hot Chip — The Warning. This groups lies somewhere between Junior Boys and the Knife in terms of sound and far from both in attitude. The band members probably take themselves the least seriously out of anyone reviewed today and invite listeners to kick back and enjoy their funky dance tracks long into the night.
Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 // Paperhouse
In a sense, the creation of some music albums can be viewed as the creation of artifacts, like a precipitate left after a chemical reaction. In the case of Joanna Newsom’s *Ys*, the songs are artifacts of events that she experienced over the course of a year. Listening to it, I begin to think that perhaps the lengthy nature of the songs is an attempt to take the microscopically small moments we experience and stretch them into a more tangible form. The moments we realize we are looking at something beautiful and mysterious — and the mornings we wake up and realize we are in love — are all moments that come, go, and change something inside of us. To me, Newsom has managed to capture the magical wonder that comes with such times. She has crafted what most of us are incapable of creating in our lives: a firm, finite representation of possibly infinite feelings and transformations that she has experienced. She is offering us proof of these occurrences.
The sound of the album is quite unlike anything else out today. Newsom is a classically trained harpist, and has a versatile, unique voice. This album also sounds different from her debut because she chose to embellish most of the songs with an orchestra, as well as an accordion and other sounds. The orchestrations were penned by Van Dyke Parks, who worked with Brian Wilson on both the 1966 and 2004 Smile album sessions. In terms of recording, the album was engineered by Steve Albini and produced by Jim O’Rourke, two unimaginably colossal gods in the music world. Albini has recorded bands like Low, Nirvana, and Slint, while O’Rourke made Sonic Youth good again a few years back and released solo work that spans the rock, experimental, and electronic genres. In short, an overwhelming mountain of talent has come together to make this record — and it sounds minimal! The instrumentation is gentle, the production transparent; Newsom’s voice is always at the center of your attention. It was a relief for me to hear the album and notice that Newsom retained complete control over the sound despite collaborations with industry superstars who overshadow her in experience.
In relation to her debut, The Milk Eyed Mender, *Ys* is a more epic affair and, in a way, represents everything a strong sophomore album (something that almost no band can achieve these days) should be: more adventurous, personal, and exciting, while retaining the musical elements that made the first such a fascinating debut — the minimal setting of harp and voice.
David Hartunian | Special to The Tartan
Sunday, November 19th, 2006 // Paperhouse
For most, the genre “goth/industrial” brings diverse musicians and bands like Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails to mind, but the more musically conscious may make a clearer distinction between goth and industrial. To a certain extent, both parties are correct in their classifications, mainly because of the constant molding and remolding of music by a number of key musicians who draw from an extensive palette of inspiration.
Goth and industrial started out as different types of music, but they both have roots in some form of social commentary. Originating in the early to mid-1970s, the term “industrial music” was coined by Industrial Records, a label created specifically for the release of experimental music by bands such as Throbbing Gristle. “Industrial,” at that point, was more of an ironic statement about how streamlined and formulaic music had become during that time, and these experimental musicians were not hesitant to use graphic and politically incorrect imagery alongside their music to make a social point — much akin to their cousin, punk music, which was itself in some ways the predecessor of goth music.
It may be surprising — but shouldn’t be shocking — that punk music preceded goth music. Punk, in all of its stripped-down structure, couldn’t possibly have survived in the long run. It was during this point that punk musicians started experimenting with more complex ways of expression through their music, particularly by developing an artistic sensitivity while still retaining a punk iconoclastic stance. As the moody middle child between punk and pop-electro music that was prevalent at the time, bands such as Joy Division (and subsequently New Order), Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Sisters of Mercy brought goth music out from punk/post-punk into gothic.
Today, goth and industrial have combined through shared aesthetics, subcultural survival, and even basic back-and-forth borrowing of styles. In this way, goth/industrial can be considered a single genre today. It draws from electronic music the most and, depending on the musician and amount of commercialization that the musician has been exposed to, the roots of goth and industrial can still be heard in the music.
