The Invisible Library

After ten years, Portishead has a new album. This is undoubtedly a good thing, though you wouldn’t know it from this Salon article by James Hannaham, who seems to think that because the band’s new album doesn’t sound like their las tone (from a decade ago) that Trip Hop Is Dead! And Portishead killed it! Wah!

April 17, 2008 | Trip hop died on April 29, 2008, in Portishead, North Somerset, England, after a long illness. The coroner listed the musical genre’s cause of death as acute gloom as well as a severe deficiency of sexiness and Afro-Caribbean influence. Its funeral was conducted by Geoff Barrow, a beat maestro with a penchant for spy soundtracks, and Beth Gibbons, a chanteuse with a quivery vibrato, two members of the group Portishead, named after the town where Barrow grew up. The funeral service has been released in the form of a CD by the band, titled “Third.”

Trip hop’s parents always hated it — especially the deep, bumping rhythm section that made it popular background music in restaurants, lounges and hipster bedrooms. Its main practitioners felt that audiences would take trip hop more seriously if they removed these elements. Gradually they deprived the genre of black grooves and strangled it with white goth. Not until “Third,” however, did the genre make a decisive move into middle Europe, taking on German and Eastern European elements.

First, Triphop wasn’t exactly a movement with any sort of claim to immortality or cohesive manifesto, or even being a real movement. It was basically a few musicians who lived in Bristol and were friends and had similar influences.

But more importantly, claiming that Portishead has tragically gone Goth and expecting this to come off as a bad thing? Run that by me again, James:

Portishead’s “Third” finally severs all ties from anything remotely black or cosmopolitan, aside from a couple of breakbeats. Its extravagance, repetitiveness and gloom make the album Euro and Romantic enough to sound, at times, like high camp. When they prepare to take this set of dirges on tour, Gibbons and Barrow will need a truckload of lace and black lipstick.

A monotonous breakbeat throbs. Barrow adds synths that bring to mind theremins and Farfisa organs — the stuff of 1950s horror movies — even the theme from “The Munsters.” Gibbons begins to groan, her voice ghostly and nearly operatic. “Tormented inside,” she sings. “Wounded and afraid inside my head.” This describes only the first song, “Silence.” Similar tracks recall a variety of mopey and/or industrial groups from the ’80s — Joy Division, Dead Can Dance, sometimes even Eastern European provocateurs Laibach.

Tapping the shallows of their despair, the group weaves in bummed-out folk tunes like “Hunter,” “The Rip” and “Deep Water,” which set Gibbons’ dreary delivery against Spanish guitars or mandolins with the reverb cranked to give the impression that she is singing inside an empty church or a lonely culvert. Gibbons urges herself to conquer her fear of drowning. Listeners who have not decided to drown themselves by the end of that track should grit their teeth for “Machine Gun,” whose beat sounds a lot like — guess what? More accurately, the weapon in question seems to have been re-created on an 808 drum machine by the noise-punk band Einst¨rtzende Neubauten — those guys who used to play shopping carts onstage.

Oh stop! You mean they’ve adapted new sounds and grown over the last decade and are now influenced by Bauhaus, Laibach, Einst¨rtzende Neubauten… and this is bad, how?

This damning evidence of the band’s growth away from a brief trend that was kinda sorta popular among Insuferable Music Snobs during the mid 90’s is truly tragic. Something tells me this guy was upset when Bowie gave up being a folkie in favor of glam, too. I guess the rest of us will just have to make do with a band’s sonic growth into something beyond the narrow confines of their previous pigeonhole. How sad for us.

Today, Elvira and I celebrated our Seventh Wedding anniversary in that tried and true way couples have for years: we bought Guitar Hero III for the Wii and spent most of the afternoon making really loud (and bad) music. It was great! I have a whole new respect for CC Deville and Dave Peverett. Poison and Foghat songs are far more complex than music snobs like myself give them credit.

Last night we saw Across the Universe (another tradition; did you know that the Seventh Anniversary is Psychadelic Musicals featuring Beatles songs? Me either. I thought it was flatware or cotton sheets).  It was excelent. But then I’m always impressed by Julie Tamor, she has a really solid ans unique visual language and brings a lot of innovative staging technique from the theater. The scene with Max being drafted is amazing stuff. Highly recommended.

I think tonight I’m making dinner. That should be fun. Spaghetti and meatballs, all around!

Picked up the new They Might Be Giants album, The Else* this week and my faith in the Johns is restored. where The Spine was a little disappointing (felt like Left over B-sides from John Henry) the Else has a fun mid 90’s alternative rock edge to it, which is surprising for They Might Be Giants. Also, not at all unappreciated. With the limp pop music of the last few years fluttering all around, sometimes you want to reach back to those high school days when there was some good music still played in public spaces.* And boy is it a sad day for Justin Timberlake when he gets his ass rocked off by They Might be Giants.

I also just got the New Pornographer’s latest, Challengers. Still absorbing it but it’s good. Mellow. Much more so than their previous stuff but more textured as well and still with the ponderous lyrics as always.
________

*I say public spaces rather than radio because seriously, who still listens to the radio?

It’s recently come to the attention of my wife and I that our music collection is not organized correctly. We have more than 13,000 songs in our iTunes Library, classified into 28 genres, which is a pretty representative collection, providing us with just enough categories to be able to arrange things meaningfully without it getting too complicated. Except, somehow it has, and this has a lot to do with the vagaries of cataloging in general. Our main problem is in deciding what performer or group goes in what genre. You’d think this would be straight forward but you’d be wrong.

Take for example our selection of the Cure. We have pretty much everything they’ve ever recorded. But where does it go? Rock? Alternative? Pop? 80’s? They aren’t traditional rock (a category I think should be reserved for your basic, straight ahead guitar based music, like Led Zeppelin or the Doors or the Beatles– but only mid to late Beatles as early Beatles is clearly pop. See where this gets confusing?)

As for the Cure, we do have an 80’s genre, which isn’t a real genre but a catch all for anything that came out during the New Wave, Post Punk era. But as the Cure were formed in the late seventies and are still recording and touring today, they span four decades so calling them 80’s just doesn’t fly. We could just say screw it and put them in Alternative, but what does Alternative even mean? These days, bands are just as likely to release albums on the Internet, which is as alternative as you can get from the Big Labels, but that doesn’t mean a Big Label, medium label or even small label won’t release the album as well. And with the mainstreaming of the Alt sound, the category just doesn’t mean anything, except as a non-genre label for everything that doesn’t fit neatly into Rock or Pop.

And the problem with Pop is really what got us into this mess in the first place. A friend of ours is getting ready for a cross country drive, moving back to Oregon and wanted some music for the road. So, naturally we said sure, come on over and we’ll burn you a disc of whatever you want. She wanted something upbeat and poppy to keep her and her boyfriend awake on the road. But My wife’s idea of pop music differs wildly form that of, well, everyone else in the world. Our Pop category covers Belle and Sebastian and Leonard Cohen. The Beach Boys and Amiee Mann. We don’t listen to Poppy Pop Pop music, like Boy Bands or Britney Spears, so our Pop selection veers wildly toward the upbeat alt scene. Except for Mr. Cohen who, as anyone even half familiar with his music will attest, is not even remotely what you’d call upbeat. But there he is, rubbing elbows with the Shins, Modest Mouse and The Postal Service.

We could move Leonard to Jazz, but our Jazz leans heavily towards the Swing/Crooner style. If we’re in the mood to listen to the swinging sound of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Billie Holiday, we don’t want to put it on shuffle and end up with an ear full of So Long, Marianne. We do have a Chanson genre, which is basically French ballads in a cabaret style which might work bu then who says, “You know what I’m in the mood for? Melancholy French Cabaret Music. And Leonard Cohen.”

Oh, it’s all so confusing.

Now that my supervisors are perusing this blog, I thought I’d give them something fun to read that also provides genuine insight into my personality (lest they think I’m just a disgruntled atheist with an overwrought fondness for cats). So here are my top five favorite albums (in no particular order):

1. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel.
   For the last few years, Elvira and I have treated CDs as nothing more than transportation devices for MP3s, allowing us to add more, more, more! to our Massive Music Collection (as I write this, I’m importing the new Frank Black double album which, when complete, will put us at 12,497 songs.) But In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of the few CDs I’ll pul out and listen to as an album because it’s the best way to hear it. All the songs flow into each other, telling one long, surreal story involving decay, reincarnation and talking smack about Jesus. Bonus!
2. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips.
   It’s a screaming, mad, lamenting rock album about pink robots and life on Mars. What’s not to love? It’s also a solidly fun album. There’s not a track on here that I don’t enjoy, even part II of the title track, which is just a girl screaming over synthpop noise and drums. It’s what john Cage would have done if he had attempted something even remotely enjoyable.
3. Doolittle, The Pixies.
   This is the album that Nirvana wanted to make with Nevermind but couldn’t because Curt Cobain was a no-talent junkie. Even if you’ve never heard of the Pixies, I gguarantee you’ve heard at least three songs from this album and if you have heard of the Pixies, you know why: songs about, “Biblical rape and torture, death, deprivation, […], both the spooning and slicing of human eyeballs.” and monkeys. Let’s not forget the monkeys. I heard them play last year and it was quite possibly the second greatest concert I’ve ever been to.
4. The best concert I’ve ever been to was Wilco. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is my favorite album of theirs, probably because it was the first I heard and the one that blew me away. But they’re all good. I could gush abut this album for a thousand words, but I don’t need to. Just listen to it and you’ll agree: you can’t be totally human until you’ve heard this album. it’s Shakespeare with a blues guitar and weird, haunted radio sounds.
5. 69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields.
   See, I am a softy, really. A whole album about love songs (technically, three whole albums). Happy, sad, poppy little ditties about love and all the tragic beauty it creates, from revolutions to obsessive compulsions and even bad jazz. Actually, I suspect it’s a complex treatise on the nature of love and that all 69 songs played in a certain sequence will bring romantic enlightenment. Or just get you off, one or the other.