Television - Marquee Moon

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Marquee Moon is one of the biggest pre-cum albums of all time. After just four songs, Television blows its glorious load all over your face. The remainder of the album is exactly like post-sex exhaustion - it's unfocused, it's messy, it's completely flaccid. As the final guitar notes of the song "Marquee Moon" ring out and fade, you can feel a palpable sense of disappointment and inadequacy coming on. You were right there, on the verge of ecstasy, but -someone- got a little too excited.

I've had Marquee Moon rattling around the old music collection since I was a junior in high school. Several times throughout the following years, the idea of keeping it or selling it for like, maybe, four dollars became a point of serious contention. There was a lot of hemming and a lot of hawing and a lot of forgetting all about it, but ultimately I decided to keep the album. Those first four songs held on to me for dear life and now? Now I'm stuck with children I'm extremely proud of and illegitimate run-off that I'd just as soon put up for adoption.

The first half of Marquee Moon - "See No Evil", "Venus", "Friction" and "Marquee Moon" - is an absolute thrill. "See No Evil" and "Venus" feature a tornado of guitar chimes, which splatter and invert upon arrival at their respective choruses. "Friction" is a short but sticky blast of energy, while "Marquee Moon" is an epic ten-minute rock crescendo that rises, falls and finally soars, reaching an orgasmic cloud of guitar arpeggios. Singer and guitarist Tom Verlaine squeals out a heavy dose of magical realism to match the theatricality of the first four songs. He mulls over a drug trip, "Broadway it looked so medieval/it seemed to flap like little pages/and I fell sideways laughing/with a friend from many stages" on "Venus" and tests the fragility of existence, "life in the hive puckered up at night/the kiss of death/the embrace of life/there I stand waiting 'neath the marquee moon/just waiting", on "Marquee Moon".

And then, it's spent. "Elevation" is a deflated counterpoint to "Marquee Moon". It comes on so sluggish and weak, it's hard to believe you're still even listening to the same Television album. "Guiding Light" drags things down even further, slopping in a piano to fill out the drudge of a mediocre ballad. "Prove It" is the only song of the last four that even comes close to sounding interesting, but even it's sprightly repetition wears thin after about a minute and a half. Finally, you have "Torn Curtain" which has one of the most annoying refrains that I've ever heard on a classic rock/classic punk/whatever album. When you hear the entire band sneering, "tears, tears, holding back the years" you'll know what I mean. They bring back the piano to reinforce the exhaustive guitar solos, trying their best to close out Marquee Moon in full poignancy, but it all just sounds lethargic and uninvolved.

It's funny, some might argue that, after the first four songs of Marquee Moon, the rest of the band's career was ALL post-sex exhaustion. I can't speak entirely well to that point, although I did find their sophomore album, Adventure, to be extremely dull. I do know, however, that Marquee Moon is too inconsistent to love and too interesting to ignore. The frustration from this duality has lead me to rarely listen to the album at all, yet I think I will always keep it around to remind myself good songs on subpar albums deserve as much affection as I can muster.

Justice - Audio, Video, Disco

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Ever since their arrival on the international music scene in 2007, many people have shafted Justice as a slightly rough-around-the-edges clone of Daft Punk. It's a sentiment that's not completely without merit: both groups are French, both are duos, they're both lovers of disco, funk and house music, they both relish in the gurgling buzz of the "Saw" preset found on basically every synthesizer, they're both fans of CD-skipping chord progressions and so on. However, I think people fail to realize that, while Daft Punk massively popularized that particular sound,  it doesn't mean it belongs strictly to them. No, Justice and Daft Punk are merely cut from the same initial cloth.

It would be one thing if Justice sounded completely derivative of Daft Punk (who themselves borrow heavily from '70s funk groups), like that gross watered-down Dr. Pepper you get at Burger King when the soda machine hasn't been refilled in a while. But Justice manage to carve out their own stellar direction - just look at their debut album, Cross, for proof. It's like listening to an epic biblical film with God spinning some fat funk behind his monstrous decks. The album gradually sling-shots all across the ages, everyone and everything caught in a thick, groovy vortex of gold-dust and thunder.

Cross is an album that has something to say. It says, "dance music can be fun AND somewhat conceptual." Even the pretentious biker-bar hipster look that both members (Gaspar Auge and Xavier de Rosney) adopt cannot derail or muddle the sheer power of their debut. Which can be a curse in disguise for a lot of artists, because, how do you effectively follow up on such greatness?

Justice make an admirable attempt with their new album, Audio, Video, Disco. I can't say that the album is perfect back to front, but I can say that, even from the outset, it serves up bombastic energy and synthesizers tossed into an abattoir. What's funny is that Audio, Video, Disco wouldn't be out of place at a progressive rock concert, what with the theatrical structure of songs like "Civilization" and "Ohio" and the multi-layered melodies of "Cannon" and "Brianvision". Through the course of the album, you get the distinct sensation that Justice could open for Rush (but not Dream Theater because they're awful) and the audience wouldn't immediately default to a "what the fuck is this?" mentality.

I also got the distinct sensation that I was watching an early '80s post-apocalyptic science fiction movie, probably starring Harrison Ford - oh, fuck it - I thought of a movie like Blade Runner. Not Blade Runner itself, but something similar to it. A cult classic that's waaay better than Blade Runner. The album seems to have this noir gospel quality that points towards rear-projected advertisements, dusty cityscapes and burning barrels. I guess "Civilization" is the prime song to target in this metaphor, with it's sliding distortion patrolling the streets and the duet of pulp-ified rebel yells, all for a future promised but never delivered.

It's important to keep in mind that Audio, Video, Disco never becomes too serious or up it's own ass, though. The album is above all groovy and intensely catchy. Just listen to the smoothy-bear hook on "Ohio" once and you'll be singing it in the shower, in the car going to work, at work, at dinner, while brushing your teeth, before you go to bed - those harmonious vocals and that playful bass line just won't leave your head. Lucky for you, it's a song you can be proud to have stuck on repeat in the old noggin.

Austra - Feel It Break

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It's a personal victory for me when I'm able to find new music that I genuinely feel I will be listening to 5 years down the line and beyond. So many people fall into this vicious cycle of gratification and disposition, where they'll obtain an album, play the shit out of it, fall in love with it, be distracted by something else that's newer and completely forget about it within three months - rinse and repeat. I think that a number of exposed, overexposed and underexposed music artists are accommodating this behavior by making music that, while initially serviceable, is found dead and mangled on a barge in a New York City river not long after the music's introduction to its audience.

This idea, I feel, supports my theory that a lot of music - popular and unpopular, past and present, across the spectrum of genres - is not necessarily -bad-, it's just boring. Which is just taking the long way around to being bad again. Why is it boring? Because, wittingly or unwittingly, it was made to be boring. It's boring with a hint of enjoyment - just enough to deceive you into feeling something kindred with the album. This is so you can apply some transient meaning to otherwise life-shaping events, like that shitty relationship you're in, or that elation from getting promoted at work, or that ramble-on road trip you always wanted to take from Columbia, Missouri to Pasadena, California.

But this particular music never sticks around. You won't fondly look back on it, you'll think about the experience by itself. The spell of that music will have long since dissipated, as the endless roulette of new artists and bands spins onwards and onwards. I feel like I know myself well enough to proactively avoid these kinds of groups and save my time for something I find to have personal and preferential longevity. That doesn't stop me completely from being snake-oiled into liking certain cardboard artists, but I do try. Regardless of whether or not you feel that the last three paragraphs are the rantings of a pretentious twat, I think we can all appreciate the idea of an artist or band sticking with us for the long haul, like a devoted friend, through the ravages of taste and time.

I've been having that very hum of assurance with a small-time (working towards medium-time) Canadian group called Austra, who recently released their debut LP, Feel It Break on Domino Records. The first song I heard from the album was the single "Lose It," something I initially didn't know what to make of. All these cacophonous women singing over analog synthesizers and 808 drum machines - I felt that maybe it was just fodder for current aesthetic trends. Big mistake. The seed was planted in my head, I couldn't stop thinking about "Lose It" for weeks and eventually I listened to it again. The way vocalist Katie Stelmanis delivered desperate lines like the recurring "don't want to lose you, don't want to lose," and "I get impatient with every word/ the more you ask me, the more I've heard," over punctuated analog synthesizers sent the most electrifying chills down my spine.

And, honestly, the rest of Feel It Break follows "Lose It" in mystifying glory. Traveling to these deep, dark woods that Austra has created is a journey into a foreboding place. A place where pale green light shimmers through the openings of dense, intertwined branches. It's almost as if Stelmanis and the Tasseomancy twins are three seductive witches, conjuring vast amounts of reverb and electricity to ensure that you never leave the forest again. The album has a very distinctive tug and pull between obsidian gothic and buzz-saw groove that is nigh impossible to resist, especially on repeated listenings. Songs like "The Beat and the Pulse" and "Spellwork" suggest that, although the forest is possessed,  the spirits know how to get down and shake a leg.  

Yet, the album retains a sense of gravity by conveying memories of anguish, likely to do with precarious, wavering relationships. On "The Beast", Stelmanis speaks on emotional liberty wrought by relational expectations, singing "The morning I was born again, I was made into a beast," and "Am I free now, am I at peace/Is that the ground below me or your feet?" built up with a rolling, grandiose piano.

Other songs highlight strands of abrupt backlash, where Stelmanis weaves phrases like, "I want your blood, I want it in my hair" on "Shoot the Water" and "Feeding on bones or anything grown," on "Spellwork". There's also, "I came so hard in your mouth/I saw the future, it was dark," on "The Future", which may be a playful (or resentful) allusion to oral sex, and if it is, bravo to Austra. It was a genius move fitting a blatant but engaging line into such operatic music.

In the end, Feel It Break is a strange, bewitched offering of nocturnal ritual dances and spectral tone-poems, an album that works its electro-magic consistently from front to back. There isn't a weak link in this chain. Austra's debut, in my eyes, is a testament to the merits of unfiltered genesis. It's music that has the distinct potential for sticking around despite the boring music that constantly out-surrounds them. And I couldn't ask for more than that.

The Kills - No Wow

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The Kills are a strange little dish. They aren't a band I can wholeheartedly embrace and they aren't a band I can outright dismiss. I initially became interested in them when I heard the luminous growl of "Monkey 23" strutting around during a night-driving scene in The Beat That My Heart Skipped. The song was so complimentary to the lush visuals of the film I could have sworn it was recorded explicitly to be placed in that scene. It wasn't until later on that I found out the song was part of the duo's debut album, Keep On Your Mean Side.

Imagine my disappoint when I discovered that none of the other songs on the album sounded even remotely like "Monkey 23". The rest of Mean Side is bogged down by tiresome riffs and smokey vocal moans that don't leave much of an impression. I felt especially insulted because they enticed me with such a nice piece of candy, just to pad it with heat-soaked Crasins. Needless to say, I left The Kills high and dry. I didn't touch, taste, smell or think of them for numerous years to follow.

As the years went on, I began to wonder what happened to the pair. Did they burn out? Did they evolve into something ridiculous? Did those comparisons to the White Stripes drive them to suicide? It turns out that only one of those things happened. They became ridiculous. But not before they made a tight, snarling collection of songs that blew me so far away that I'm still trying to figure out where I landed.

No Wow is like a brief, hard slap in the face. The exact kind of slap that comes from a jilted lover. With the methodical pitter-patter of a subdued drum machine in the background, guitarist Jamie Hince fires off palm-muted clicks, roaring hammer-ons and thick, thick, thick chords. That masterful touch of controlled reverb and tone-doubling found on tracks like "Love is a Deserter" and "Murdermile" provides some authentic satisfaction. Imagine an electric guitar combined with an air horn, shrunk down and thrown into a glass jar filled halfway with sand. That's the sound of The Kills in this particular instance.

Throughout the album, Alison Mosshart groans out curtailed, skinny-white soul. It's a just-right mix of deep attitude and melodic mindfulness - something that many other lady singers (both popstars and indie darlings) tend to forget as they drown themselves in vibrato and general fat-assery. Mosshart's lyrical imagery is cool, dark and dangerous - on "At the Back of the Shell," she sings, "kiss all your fingers, what's that for?/ you'll never get to heaven with your shirt all torn," then wheezing in the chorus, "it ain't such a thrill." It's clear that she wants to be cryptically hip, but it works through the entirety of No Wow. There's a lot of murder, sex and guns that come out of Mosshart's mouth and it works with the sleazy sensuality that the music conjures.

I suppose the best way to look at No Wow, is a brief but powerful moment of genius by a contemporary rock act that sort of fell back into the sea of mediocrity once the album was done. Honestly, it's giving The Kills a lot of credit - many, many, many bands these days can't seem to work their way out of superficial expectations to make a decent rock album, let alone several. The Kills pulled it off, though, and they should be commended for that.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - From Her to Eternity

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It took me a long time to really understand what the big deal with Nick Cave was. For several years, the towering Australian with impossible, tall black hair was at the peripherals of my music vision. I paid him no mind, even when people would mention him. All I knew was that he was a music fixture. He was one of those draped monoliths, the kind you don't bother to uncover even though you always feel like you should.

I had then received a number of his albums from a friend. I don't know if it was the fact that I got so many at once or that my ears wanted something different, but nothing really stuck to me. I even saw his performance in Wings of Desire. Interesting constructions of noise and storytelling, but nothing slap-in-the-face profound. About a year later my friend tried once again, giving me remastered versions of two of Cave's albums. I took them home and gave them both a hard listen.

It was at this point that Cave and his Bad Seeds finally, after years of indifference, broke through. It was in the form of From Her to Eternity. It's difficult to describe why I became taken with this jagged, broken antique of an album. I suppose it's because the execution of the pounding instrumentation and the venomous lyrical moan are handled with equal care. On repeated listens, I found it impossible to resist the door-thud bass and crumbled distortion of "Cabin Fever!." The way Cave desperately wails, "The captain's forearm like bunched-up rope, with Anita wrigglin' free on a skull'n'dagger, and a portrait of Christ, nailed to an anchor etched into his upper...," it snared its way viciously into my ears and, this time, I thoroughly enjoyed the torment.

From Her to Eternity plays out like some sort of condemned cabaret. Cave is the serpentine host, spinning the fates of unscrupulous and destructive individuals. His sneer is so apparent that it could be mistaken for revelry.The Bad Seeds dance a chorus line in the background, providing jaunty slabs of noise from broken pianos, jackhammers and glass. The title track is particularly ragged, Blixa Bargeld's gravel-mixing guitar spilling out as Cave sing-talks, "And she is shinning it down the vine, out of her nightmare and in to mine".

I feel like From Her to Eternity exemplifies what it means to successfully integrate the aesthetics of noise and found sounds into well-told rock music. Dissonance is a fickle mistress but when married to a strong story and an undeniable presence, it can be one of the most worthwhile things you'll ever hear in your life.

Lovesliescrushing - Glissceule

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There are many times when words utterly fail to describe the immensity of certain things that exist in life. Beautiful music albums are just one of them. After all, it isn't so much words that come to mind when you hear those familiar chords, so warm and textural, floating down upon you. No, it is -feeling-. A total envelopment that pins you to the ground while simultaneously blasting you off into the star-specked infinite. It's everything you wish life would be, all in under an hour.

I've always thought that if being in love had a sound, it would be Glissceule by Lovesliescrushing. It's a dream of phantasmal intimacy - the gentle kiss on a lover's neck, the intertwined slumber of passionate exhaustion - all run through by tunnels of blissful light and - floating in all directions - kaleidoscopic auroras painted against the deep black. You don't just listen to Glissceule, you travel into it. It is a massive cloud streaked by swirling guitar layers and windy female vocals. It is a gossamer blanket that, once inside, you will never want to leave.

Glissceule is the sound of a craft slowly perfected over several albums. Lovesliescrushing's mastermind, Scott Cortez, has smoothed out all the grumbling distortion and antique music box chimes that had appeared on previous efforts and turned it into enormous cascading ice sheets. The ice masses are not lifeless and hollow, however. There are shimmering green-grey flames that roil and tumble deep within. Melissa Arpin's unintelligible moans wander atop and through the sheets, like tape-dubbed sirens echoing their way to a burbling rest. Her whispers beckon you to just let go of it all for a while. Let go for 60 or so minutes. Let go of reason, anxiety, doubt - and just -be-.

I can't tell you how many times I've listened to this stunning piece of music. Every time - every single time - I am completely taken by it. After all, it is difficult to get tired of an album brimming with so many surreal and saccharine adventures. "Endless possibilities" doesn't even begin to describe it. The best memories of your life, the greatest fantasies never told, the very border between subconscious nostalgia and psychedelic lush - it is all here in the big blue orb of Glissceule.

Radiohead - OK Computer

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It's an interesting exercise to trace back the relationship of you and certain albums that came into your life - albums that crept along the folds of space-time to impact your life in some significant way. Like a hip English teacher who really connected with you by talking to your experience or a fleeting lover that showed you the explosive, beautiful auroras in your subconsciousness weren't completely baseless, music albums can act as giant tick marks on your own personal chronology. Your perspective on such experiences may change as you grow, but you're inextricably bound to it in some way, shape or form for the rest of your life.

I can count OK Computer among the handful of albums that have majorly transformed my expectations of the art form known as music. Forget, for a moment, the onslaught of critical praise, the uniform adoration by fans. Forget the self-indulgent comparisons to 21st century alienation. Forget the solid gold statues that will inevitably be erected for this "Best Album of the '90s". Remember what it is. It is a record. It is music that Radiohead (like thousands of other artists) decided to share with the world - all in the hope that people would enjoy and absorb it as it was. Whether or not it is the "best" or "most overrated" is irrelevant. The conceptual prowess of the album seeps through, rain or shine, and you realize that the band is, at the least, saying something of significance.

My personal journey along the shifting landscapes of OK Computer is distinctly a tourist's journey. I find myself in a trolley car, alternating in speed as we move through an inverse world, completely forgotten by time. Singer Thom Yorke is the tour guide, pointing out all the amazing, horrendous and electrifying sights. "Airbag" slides along next to the trolley, bubbling up with DJ Shadow's bottles-in-a-trash bag drum line. The scene immediately gives way to "Paranoid Android," a hyper-advanced civilization in the distant background, building up and falling down in a fast-forward opera. Yorke highlights the biggest cultural phenomenon - the decadent "Gucci little piggy" at the height of it's power and the mournful chant, "God loves his children," as the crumpled aftermath ensues.

As the trolley passes a crystalline field of ruined planes, cars and trains, the glimmering notes of "Let Down" ring out, quickly undercut by a repeated message on a malfunctioning robot. "Fitter. Happier. More productive. Not drinking too much" - the automated life coach of a bygone era. "No Surprises" and "Lucky" bring the trolley back out to the expansive wastes, a spaghetti western guitar tumbling along with searing gusts of wind. And then the final stop - "The Tourist." While it is certainly a bit of ironic self-assessment, the atmosphere provided is far more prevalent. The glass guitar notes force the trolley upward into space, while Yorke frames the experience, "you ask me whether or not I'm going, at a thousand feet per second."

In all honesty, my experience with Radiohead's OK Computer has waned since our introduction. Where, at first, it was like bathing myself in profound musical goo, the album has now become more of a cherished artifact on my wall. I can still enjoy its composition and texture thoroughly, but, in terms of my personal music journey, OK Computer ended up being a gateway to better things.