BEST OF APRIL: A Conversation With Two Guest Contributors
For all future BEST OFs I’ll be asking a couple of people involved in music blogs to comment on my favourite tracks of the month, keep me in check, and give a wider perspective on things. Shane represents Ireland over at The Torture Garden. Sean, who recently left these shores to return to Canada, writes for Said The Gramophone.
[Photo credit: Chris Seufert]
Mike: My favorite track of the month was by Mountain Machine, I said that it was “an instrumental and psychedelic revving up and tuning up…” until… “the throb begins. The journey, landscape and this band’s raw energy rolls out along deserted roads with great speed and engulfs all.”
Sean: Oh man, this starts out SO strong - shades of Battles or just a boot against your head. I think it loses the plot around the minute mark, though - too reminiscent of the Doctor Who soundtrack or the opening of a PBS/BBC science-for-kids show. The “quiet” interlude is anemic, dull instead of pretty, and when the noise comes back it doesn’t do so with enough fierceness. I’d like this band better if they sounded more like Ratatat and less like Can - and if their songs were all 2:20 long.
Shane: From the sounds of this, the word ’subtlety’ just isn’t in Mountain Machine’s vocabulary. It’s like what would happen if you looked into the mind of some hyperactive kid watching Saturday morning cartoons, and poured it out in sheet music. There’s fuzz, synth, beautiful strings, someone repeating the word ‘tigers?’, glockenspiel, alarm clocks, choir samples, and a big fat bastard S+M riff that would make Alison Goldfrapp blush. If I thought I understood it properly I’d say it was brilliant, but I’m not sure I do.
Mike: Fierceness does leaves the blocks slower for the second leg, but it’s the return after the breathy and the throb that I enjoy: an indulgence, and the floating sensation in so much pummeling.
MP3: THE SHORTWAVE SET - NO SOCIAL
Mike: I listened to The Shortwave Set’s track so much that come Autumn that song might just have to be deleted from my computer and the hard-drive ritualistically burnt.
Shane: This is so catchy I want to try and guess the words just so I can sing along. The swinging pose of the verse gives away to a pop chorus so fine it seems to come right up to your ear, promising to tell a secret - but loses its nerve at the last minute, and sways back into that jaunty verse with a smile, brass lines played with tongue firmly in cheek. It’s a little temptation of a song, it promises brilliance, and that’s enough.
Sean: I’ve uh never liked the Shortwave Set. People talk about their resemblance to St Etienne, like that’s a good thing, but I don’t like St Etienne either. I think it’s all connected to how I’m a grouch in the summertime, cowering in the gloom. I hate the heat, hate lounging with a cocktail. If I’m out and about I’m on my bicycle, high-fiving the sun, heart a red balloon in my chest, and music like this feels apathetic, energyless, “chill”. Music for parking lots with vinyl flowers. (Oh - have I mentioned how Danger Mouse is the most overrated producer in the universe? He is.)
Mike: Unlike Sean, I live for summertime, I just never know it until April time. Opinion is divided on this one, but the yays on the right have it 66% to 33%. People always vote for the people with the widest smiles, though they aren’t usually the wisest folks…
Mike: Cat’s in Paris’ cacophony of sound had very excited at the start of April, “Dystopic, spirraling, and about as close as “hardcore / experimental / folk” could get to indie-pop…”
Sean: I’m beginning to get jaded about the kitchen-sink school of indie pop but, well, I’m not there yet. I still love these songs with TOO MANY backing vocals, TOO MANY digressions, part Los Campesinos, part Flaming Lips, part “Mr Blue Sky” and part “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I do wish that these young bands leaned a little heavier on CHORUSES. Does this song need to be a million minutes long? Do they have that many things to say? I like it when there are ten things going on at once but not when a band just noodles prettily around for a minute and a half in the middle of a tune. It’s the “foxes” bit in the 4th minute that’s by far my favourite thing here - the band feels volatile, thrilled, like they’re challenging themselves to see how much cinnamon they can swallow.
Shane: It sounds like you’re in a new town, and all your new friends are bringing you to a party. Their nicely coupled melodies promise dancing, bad lighting, spilled drinks, perfume, and downtown happiness, and the chorus is like the rush of grinning paranoia that comes with all that casual drug-taking you’ve been doing. After that it’s like a dozen flashbacks at once, with great reaching choruses that send you back out onto the streets. But then you’re sober again, or you think you are, holding that weird wide-eyed feeling that comes with the knowledge that you’ve danced till dawn, sore-heeled, a gang of ragged friends chasing one another in the early strains of sunlight that dapple the buildings everywhere. It’s a beautiful feeling.
[Original post] | [Photo credit: Puck 90]
Leave a comment if you have anything to add. Heard any awesome British music this month?
I’ve just updated and reshuffled the NBGL mixtape (which you can listen to online) with a new Cats in Paris track, and Mountain Machine.
