New Blog: Geist Bites

Dear friends, followers, countrymen, and similar,

While I have contacted some of you individually about my new blog, Geist Bites, it's probably easier and more efficient to write a post directing all of you towards it. However, when I'm a place with half-decent internet, I'll try to get round to writing to everybody.

Technolust has run its course, it's been very difficult to juggle schoolwork, attempting to write anything for magazines and this blog all at once. The 'putting things in scare quotes' manouevre has gotten very old very quickly, too.

As a result, I'm going to make my life much easier and update a smarter, sexier blog regularly and succinctly. The content is largely the same, it's just going to be better. Simple.

http://geistbites.wordpress.com

Have a read: if you like what you see, subscribe and, if you're feeling generous, spread the word!

Bombay Bicycle Club - 'Flaws'

Another crafty cross-post from the good people at PopMatters.

Named after a bourgeois curry franchise, Bombay Bicycle Club made quite a stir a few years ago with EPs The Boy I Used to Be and How We Are. These records issued the band’s signature sound, and were as creamy white and tempered as those restaurants’ interiors. There was a politeness to them, perhaps a lack of bite. It turns out that this has been the band’s staple ever since, but there was also a restless creativity to those EPs that helped to push them to the top of the UK Indie Charts.

There was just a dash of unaffected attitude to them, so Bombay Bicycle Club’s current reluctance to rock out hints at a self-serious sophistication, a stand-in for the squealing noise made by their many peers. Nevertheless, these early records were lovely. Pinned by vocalist and guitarist Jack Steadman’s quivering, pining voice, they told of a maturity and a dynamism that reached far beyond their 16 years.

They carried those records’ best songs—“The Hill”, “Sixteen”, and “Ghost”—into last year’s debut, I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose. It was, perhaps, less successful than their avid fan base had hoped, and it met mixed reviews. It was also a slow burner, and it was easy to mistake this for their being tedious, or having simply not applied enough thrust to their music. However, there were occasions on this record when they threatened to burst, to make good on their promising teenage kicks. Yet they largely kept it restrained, so these moments of overdrive were merely points of punctuation. The new material failed to match the old and, excepting “Dust on the Ground”, “What If”, and lead single “Always Like This”, it wasn’t an easy album to love. Only the album closer, “The Giantess”, hinted at the band’s new folk-based direction, and even that was kitted with an electronic beat.

To support I Had the Blues, Bombay Bicycle Club played a series of acoustic showcases. They are continuing to do this to support Flaws. At those gigs, the band’s singular, devastating flaw became apparent: the star of Bombay Bicycle Club is Jack Steadman. The rest of the band are certainly competent, but Steadman combines the songwriting engine, the vocal force, and the instrumental prowess to shine brighter than the rest of them combined. It’s likely that he’ll go solo at some point, and it’s likely that this will be successful. It’s also likely that Flaws was made largely at his command.

Flaws is the loveliest sound of a band totally losing the plot. While still polite, the band are earthier, more pastoral, but they sound a little homeless. Perhaps they can’t decide if they’re from the deep South, the Midwest, or from deep within the English countryside. Perhaps they’re equally as trapped by the calloused fingertips of folk as they are the grubby fingernails of post-punk.

Of course, Steadman dominates. He leads the band through the plains of “Dust on the Ground”, borrowed from I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose. He also makes them wait at the crossroads of “Leaving Blues”. Surprisingly, it’s not a Leadbelly cover. It is, however, utterly, devastatingly, beautiful.

The album’s sense of displacement—geographically; from the band’s back catalogue; from the expectations of genre confines and pigeonholes—makes it a confusing whole. The triplets of “Ivy and Gold” and “My God” make way for gorgeous vocal harmonies, and “Rinse Me Down” is both open and intimate. However, Flaws suffers because there’s little in the way of logical progression between it and its predecessors. Bombay Bicycle Club’s move from indie belligerence to bucolic folk doesn’t signal a development in their sound. Instead, it just seems like they’re being inconstant. Only on closer “Swansea” does the band branch out, embellishing their sound with keyboards and drums treated with dollops of reverb. Perhaps where “The Giantess” indicated their move towards folk, “Swansea” indicates their move towards mournful psychedelic pop. Its drones are layered and there’s an interesting interplay between electronic and organic sound. It would be very interesting to hear Bombay Bicycle Club explore this sound further.

It’s far more original then any of their previous efforts. However, where Flaws diverges so far from what we expect, it’s likely that any further experimentation would make the band lose focus entirely.

6/10

Extra! Extra! Read it here.



Bombay Bicycle Club playing 'Rinse Me Down'. Lovely, isn't it?

Kele - 'The Boxer'

The second in the last few weeks' crossposts from Popmatters, with many more yet to come. This is of Kele's recent album The Boxer.

People used to buy physical copies of records. This process, known then as the music business, involved exchanging hard currency for acetate or vinyl. It was intimately connected to the record stores in which this took place processing and pigeonholing bands for commercial purposes. However, by the early ‘90s, bands were blurring the lines between music in the rock/pop sections and the dance/electronic sections of these record stores. On a mainstream level that was very commercially appealing. Bloc Party were a part of this, too, helping to demolish indie kids’ prejudices towards dance music, and perhaps even towards dancing itself. They also performed several spectacular ram-raids on the charts with killer singles like “Helicopter”, “Banquet”, and, more recently, “Flux”.

Bloc Party broke ground by making likable, acute, music that was radio-ready and had big pop hooks. By drawing on influences like Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Wire, they opened up people’s ears to the post-punk past. By allowing electronically-inclined produces to remix their songs, they made the dance floor accessible to people who formed opinions about music in the aftermath of ‘90s superclub culture. They gave everyone from music obsessives to passive consumers something to think and talk about, too.

The band’s hiatus after the release of 2008’s Intimacy gave Bloc Party’s frontman, Kele Okereke, the time to move to Berlin, and work with producers XXXChange and Hudson Mohawke in New York. In that time, Kele beefed up and made his sound more muscular, too.

On The Boxer, Kele has made a record from solid gold beats and squelching synths. It splatters, full of processed clunks and an air of intensity different to Bloc Party’s brooding anthems. This is the central point of difference between Kele’s solo output and that of Bloc Party. Where the latter were, defiantly, a rock band who dabbled with electronics, Kele’s music begins from a position of pure eclecticism and spreads outward.

The Boxer’s biggest hitters are its first three tracks, “Walk Tall”, “On the Lam”, and “Tenderoni”. Disappointingly, they are heavy-handed where they need to be just heavy. Meanwhile, tracks like “The New Rules” and “All The Things I Could Never Say” are half-hearted when they should be full-blooded. It’s not clear whether it’s greater or lesser than the sum of its parts, because the math just doesn’t add up: it equates inner-city dubstep sounds with gentrified electro and globalized percussion, and it all sounds scrubbed up and sanitized.
If Kele’s been digging the crates, his findings sound more like he’s been tearing leaves out of textbooks than concocting theories and baffling us with a fevered imagination. It sounds like he’s been doing calculations and drawing graphs on his influences’ effectiveness rather than hammering his musical loves relentlessly.

“Tenderoni” is a buzzing club banger, sure, but its overhanging hook tries too hard to sound authentically housey. It’s not deep or resonant enough to match the dubstep it so wants to emulate, either. However, the martial opener, “Walk Tall”, drills and demands attention, complete with a creeped-out anti-chorus. “On the Lam”, meanwhile, sounds like a combination of uplifting ‘90s house, the brutal hardcore of that same period, with a contemporary sheen borrowed from Timbaland and Skream.

The Boxer is a thicker, heavier, version of the sort of music DFA were putting out almost 10 years ago. It doesn’t sound dated, but it does sound like Kele’s waited a long time to have his way and apply lessons that he learned during the early days of Bloc Party on his own terms. However, the album he’s made is much more successful when bent on making bodies jump, as his chaotic live sets have proved. As a result, the album isn’t particularly lovable, but it isn’t an artistic failure, either. Where The Boxer gobbles up contemporary music and spits it back out, hopefully, Kele will refine his palate for future offerings to turn out something more solid and consistent.

You can read this review here. Have a look; if you give them hits, they feel like kisses.



This is the video for 'Tenderoni', The Boxer's lead single.

Robert Downey Jr. in 'Less Than Zero'

This is a craftily crossed-post of my contribution to PopMatters' 100 Essential Film Performances 2010. Mine is about Robert Downey Jr. in Less Than Zero:

In written form, Less Than Zero is a thing of brusque cruelty. Its cinematic counterpart is icier, but its frenzied sentimentality is maybe a little more human. The book’s characters are faceless blurs, captured in stark, clear, English. Their screen personae, however, are clearly frail and fractured. The film depicts real youth with unreal privilege. It’s a neon flood of gauche fashion and loud music, almost unbearably rooted to its time. However, it continues to be relevant: it’s visually startling and undercut with trauma. The story deals with the tension between extreme and grave events and the null interior lives to whom these events happen. This performance by Downey Jr., as the troubled Julian, succeeds because he captures how important these events seem to be to young lives. He’s sometimes zany, juvenile, jovial, but he’s set in a deep gloom. The film tracks Julian’s descent from grinning boyhood into gurning, sweating, addiction and prostitution until his redemption in death.

In the film’s opening scene, at his high school graduation, he’s all charm: a nostalgic smile at his father, a genial, audacious, kiss on Clay’s mother’s cheek. However, the change in Julian is evident in Clay’s flashbacks, where he is brasher, garrulously-clad, talking about “high IQ pussy”. By his appearance at the ‘Fuckmas’ party, he’s volatile and nervous and his eyes are wider, wilder. Downey Jr. punctuates Julian’s terrible scenario with sincere gestures of dented worry, mirroring his own addiction. A tragic success.

You can read the rest of this year's selection of performances here.

This is Less Than Zero's trailer. Please forgive it for having not dated particularly well.

The-Dream - 'Yamaha'

This is the video to The-Dream's 'Yamaha' (and 'Nikki' and 'Abyss'). It came out a while ago, so this post is a little late.

Like Alicia Keys' 'Have You Ever Tried Sleeping With A Broken Heart', 'Yahama' has clearly plundered Prince's royal archives and bolstered his findings with a wall of keyboards. It's romantic, yet still contains the word 'motherfucker'. Where those keyboards deliver distinctly '80s signifiers, it has about four solid gold hooks littered throughout the song.

It's romantic enough to directly address a young lady whose name is still tattooed to our protagonist's back. Its come-ons are oversexed and undercut with melancholy and it's got enough drifting power to romanticise things out in the big, wide, world too like running for the hills and escaping the cops.

For the rest of us, 'Yamaha' is the sound of lifting your hands, or poking your head, out of a big, bad, Corvette so everyone can see what bliss it is to be young and sharply dressed. It's the sort of thing you can imagine being brought to the screen by a kinder Michael Mann.

The xx - 'Shelter' (John Talabot's Feel It Too remix)

Shelter (John Talabot's Feel it too Remix) by John Talabot

The one contributor here at 'Technolust towers' really likes The xx. You can tell because s/he wrote a really earnest review of their self-titled debut album about a year ago.

This is John Talabot's remix of 'Shelter', one of the most poignant cuts from that record. It was featured on Pitchfork's Forkcast yesterday. Previously, Talabot has reworked Delorean's 'Seasun' to great effect, but more on that later.

This remix makes a 'moody and protective' song remeniscent of the 'urban experience' sound as smooth, shimmering, and buoyant as a Balaeric summer. It sounds a bit like Hans Zimmer's plucky, clunky, xylophonic soundtrack to Tony Scott's romance-on-the-run True Romance.

"It's Alive!"

And so we witness the invention, the essence, of a horror movie archetype.

More on this at a later date.