The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico

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Clinic - Walking With Thee

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Before their stunted growth in the mid-2000s, Clinic was one of those bands that actually mastered their strange assortment of influences, rather than being ruled by them. They established a sound that was effortlessly irreverent, a kind of controlled schizophrenia spelled out by distorted clarinet, pulsating organ and, save for a few exceptions, trim drum patterns. Instead of assuming the presumptuous mantle of mixed media party host, the band traversed fog-addled forests of the subconscious to carve out a niche - regardless of the historical or contextual fallout.

Walking With Thee highlights the band's ability to create darkness as viewed through a lens of cryptic abstraction. The album comes off much like those 3D holographic cards that you tilt to see the image change, the only difference is that in place of the rainbow refraction is a monochromatic white to gray to black, all stabbed through by windows of pale teal translucence. Where as their debut album, Internal Wrangler, was a swatch - turning from glib folk tale, to bittersweet eulogy, to cheeky social commentary - Walking With Thee presents a distinctly bizarre winter.

Aside from the opening track, "Harmony", the album is chalked full of revolving-door lyrics that make pinning down a respectable interpretation difficult. On "Harmony", singer Ade Blackburn proclaims in his high-register croon, "I believe in Christmas eve/I believe to trust one's free/I believe in happiness/no one living with regrets/come fill yourself with dreams", which is a clear, albeit, resigned call for the goodness in all people. While the lyrics in the song are uncharacteristic of the rest of the album, "Harmony" comes off as a sort of shining gate, standing before the specter-flown landscapes of the rest of the album. It's not that the song is stylistically different - the clarinet, punctuating keyboard and simple house drum rhythm are right in line with the rest of Walking With Thee - but it's optimistic lyrics push it into a reverse-Pixies scenario, where the words are kind and the music is ominous.

The album's most successful hit, "Walking With Thee", is an organ-grinder with clashing drums and Blackburn's paranoid librarian delivery. "As you climb up the stairs and come back forever/Summer's in the house, untamed it was" warbles the singer, following it up with a repetition of "walking with thee" in the chorus. Fuck knows what Blackburn is referring to, but the imagery in the lyrics and the rough delivery of the music provides a creeping, jerky stop-motion animation for the mind, something involving inanimate objects coming to life. Which is convenient, because the music video for the song chooses exactly such a visual representation. When the singer cries out repeatedly, "no, no, no, no", any semblance of knowing what the song might actually be about goes completely out the window.

The nocturnal sway of songs like "Mr. Moonlight" "The Vulture" and "For the Wars" prompt you to travel to otherworldly beat cafes - far, far away from Earth. Everyone snapping their fingers and rolling their shoulders in hypnotized unison, not knowing if they are waiting for an ending or a beginning. Murals of spattered blocks, undefined triangles, cubed self-portraits, still-life lamps and fruit turned into precocious beasts and random phrases litter the sparse walls. It's a place in your mind you can't quite find, but also a place that is undeniably there.

Walking With Thee also pulls upon the sparse, acid guitar lines of spaghetti western soundtracks, mashing them into the ramshackle repetition of krautrock. "Welcome", "The Bridge" and "Sunlight Bathes Our Home" all feature jittering drum lines that have distorted, lightly reverbed guitar ribbons strewn across the top. Add in the permeating ghost of the clarinet, and the idiosyncratic haunt comes on quite strong. The songs act as a textured counterpoint to the pensive night meditation of the album's other half.

After writing all of this about the album, I've come to realize that there is a disjointedness to Walking With Thee that is definitely noticeable, but altogether unimportant in the record's enjoyment. It's because there is a roundabout cohesion, like a collage of unrelated pictures and trinkets that just -works- when you see it. Even "Pet Eunuch", which stands alone as a blast of needling punk rock, somehow fits amidst the minimal genre film soundtracks and dark jazz fusion. Walking With Thee is much like a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, basking in the unassociated associations that arise out of letting the mind loose. With Clinic, their minds found a playground in music, and though the album comes off quite serious, there is always a lingering grin behind each furrowed brow.

I Break Horses - Hearts

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I'm sure many people think the dreamy side of Scandanavia has been staked unequivocally by The Ravonettes. For over a decade, the band has created guitar lines that surf their way through wide glass corridors and down avalanches of wild distortion. They have fused together demure harmonies (male/female, which is hard to tell without having seen pictures of them) that come off with a rueful sweetness - like a lover that kisses you and sticks a cigarette in your arm at the same time. But a new wind blows stronger out of the Svensk region - one that is altogether more nocturnal, saccharine and chilling. That frosty gust goes by the name of I Break Horses.

The duo's debut album, Hearts, is a textured glob of washed out melodies and chiming synthesizers, kept in line by pulsing bass drum and stilted snare breaks. Both exciting and distant, the album is reminiscent of a bittersweet relationship caught in an iceblock - the memory of which is darkened by the passing of several years. A cherished memory, but a resented one all the same. Always outlined by luminous pearl white, but always filled in with an inky, obscuring midnight-green. "Winter Beats", which confidently announces the band's existence, shimmers across an ocean of arpeggios, while singer Maria Linden floats just above the surface. Half the time it's too difficult to tell what she's singing - her low, hushed murmurs only reveal a few words in each line. It's almost as if Linden is talking in her sleep, recalling to herself more than anyone else.

Frankly, it's a gorgeous aesthetic. I Break Horses' particular lack of clarity is what makes their debut climb head and shoulders above the competition. There's a desperate intimacy here that most bands can only dream of achieving. Riding along on a crest of distorted synth lines, pushed out again and again, the band never allows you complete surrender, but they also welcome you into their arms, half-asleep, longing for an embrace. The breadth of Hearts is so sullen and anxious, exemplified on "I Kill Your Love, Baby!", where Linden softly sighs the mantra, "I kill your love/Kill your love, baby". I can only imagine this is a kind of inverted anthem for the resentment of waning desire. The relationship has run its course, the passion has gone out. Now all that's left is a slow, selfish death.

My personal favorite of all the songs on Hearts, even though they're all very good, is "Cancer", a slow-build of white-light synthesizer chords and a repeated guitar note ticking away underneath. Linden moans along, almost encouraging the synthesizer to keep going. It all culminates with heavy snare bursts, cascaded over endless cymbals. To me, "Cancer" personifies what the album is all about. It comes off like a eulogy, not only for a love lost, but an expectation never met.

I Break Horses leave all these calloused memories undulating at the mercy of their ocean. Hearts is not an album of answers, and the band never makes any pretense about that. The disenchantment of love and trust is implied, but it's delivered with such a somber resignation that any potential cynicism is disarmed. Foremost, the album is about the glue, the stitching, the nooks and the crannies that exist between our memories and how we perceive them. The space between what we felt we deserved and what we actually got. It is an area where insecurity and satisfaction go hand in hand - a place which only music can adequately describe.

Julia Holter - Ekstasis

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Amazon is kind of like that drunk friend whose waaaaaay too into music, tossing suggestions at you with only the vaguest of guidelines and a misguided sense of altruism. They know about so much music at once, that any suggestions are destined to be too broad to make much sense. A little sense, but not much.  Oh, you like the Pretenders? You might like Aerosmith, too. Oh, you like Aphex Twin? You might like Slipknot, then. Oh, you like My Bloody Valentine? You'd probably like ABBA. If you think Siouxsie and the Banshees are good, just wait until you hear KISS!!!

Those are all real suggestions I've gotten from Amazon. I don't fucking know, either.

Most comparisons aren't logical in any immediate way, but hell if Amazon doesn't claw and scratch to connect those oh-so-distant dots. Of course, blind chance has to win out eventually (based on the law of averages) and, if only briefly, the website finds its moments of triumph.  Every now and then, Amazon haphazardly delivers up a gorgeous suggestion that falls right in line with your particular taste. One that recently befell my "Recommended for You" page was Julia Holter's Ekstasis.

If you can imagine a fancy arisocrat's hedge maze, complete with classical statues and ornate fountains, sporadically being dragged into a deep black vortex, then you sort of have an idea of how Ekstasis plays out. It's an album that finds a strange grace in the chaos of vocal samplers and stream of consciousness song structures. You can tell that Holter enjoys the austere beauty of an ambient soundscape, but she also likes to chide and tease every once and a while.

In a sense, Holter is the fanciful young woman you find yourself playfully chasing through the hedge maze. Statues float by and crumble in her wake and ghostly versions of the singer appear randomly, her gentle vocals sweeping past in every direction. The album's enigmatic opener, "Marienbad" unfolds like a chamber choral performance, swirling organ and Holter's overdubbed vocals filling in the empty spaces. The lyrical content, as glib as it is, most likely references Last Year at Marienbad, a classic French New Wave film (one I personally hate) about a couple at a chateau comparing themselves to statues: "I can hear a statue/wonder why they're so still/all day in the garden", at least, I think that's what she's saying. It's hard to tell throughout much of the Ekstasis, because, as I said, Ms. Jules likes to be a bit of cheek. The way she cuts herself off and allows her overdubs to float up to the surface is her way of grinning widely and saying, "I dare you to read into this."

"In the Same the Room" is pretty much the closest thing to a traditional "pop" song Ekstasis has to offer and even then, Holter makes sure to loosen the reigns and see where her subconscious garden may take her. It may start out with a meditative organ and straight-ahead drum machine, but the structure is slashed with flourishes of her angelic overdub and briefly careens off the cliff into a plume of whistling and vibraphone.

Of course, her sense of humor and beauty shines the brightest on "Goddess Eyes I". The song is a vocorder mantra of sorts - Holter's effects-laden vocals wavering through like a depressing future Calvin Klein ad stuck on repeat, "I can see that the eyes are not alive to cry". The singer soon adds unfiltered vocal booms to extend the melody out in a strangely exciting way, showing that she has a rueful credence for the decorum in her hedge maze. The inevitability of the black vortex entices her, but the defacement of the garden disturbs her all the same.   

It all works because the album isn't really about cohesive narratives or well-articulated ideas, as much as it's about the feelings and placement her music puts you in. Her strung-together phrases and helter skelter synthesizer arrangements evoke an amorphous sense of calm (like any good ambient) but also inscrutable mystery. Holter's lure into the hedge maze of Ekstasis may be forboding, but amidst the tall green walls, stone gazebos and Greek statues that litter the garden, there is always a presiding serenity. The singer wants you to embrace the vortex, but to never let go of your bearings.

Wild Flag - Wild Flag

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If you're looking for the musical equivalent of four howling women on a mean, smoke-pluming bulldozer, blasting through house and storefront alike, Wild Flag is a band for you. Their self-titled debut is both a soul-shaking and oddly tender experience that leaves you constantly scanning the horizon for the band's next swing around on their audio-dozer express. It's an energy that few bands these days can seem to match - not just in the powerful growl of their guitars or the reckless tempo shifts or the schizophrenic vocal delivery, but in the way these ladies apply the intricacies of melody, invention and texture.

Featuring a line-up of '90s indie rock darlings (Sleater-Kinney, the Minders and Helium) the ladies of Wild Flag are well-practiced in their craft. After years of juggling projects, shifting members, forays into other media (Carrie Brownstein and Portlandia), Wild Flag finally emerged from the chaos back in 2011, with a record to match. The immediacy and, perhaps desperation, felt on their debut points to a sense of ultimate release, a sonic boom of creative energy that had been building up for years and years.

The opening blast of love-struction, "Romance", sets the tone quite nicely. With it's slightly detuned guitar chords jittering on and off, singer/guitarist Brownstein offers a rubbery barrage of earnest desires and admissions. Though it's never clear who she's talking about, she is singing in the personal "my" but also the collective "we", so you get the sense that the band was in full support of the song's message. She sings lines like , "Hey, you fill up the spaces, those empty places/the corners and cracks/you kill my sickness, my only witness/you're all that I have" and "We love the sound, the sound is what found us/sound is the blood between me and you". For me, "Romance" stands as a defiant optimism for love in the face of an increasingly cynical world, with music to glue us together. Or just loving music. Or both. I can definitely get behind any of those sentiments.

"Something's Come Over Me" tones things down just a little bit, shifting their dozer into second gear, with measured guitar notes and singer/guitarist Mary Timony's gentle, reassuring delivery. Timony sings of anxiety, "Something's coming over me/got a fever now/I can't breathe" and "Let me ask your advice/if I fall once/will I fall twice?", with music to cure what ails, "Oooh, oooh, oooh, I hear you comin' through my stereo". The song is quickly followed by a hard thrust forward into "Boom" and the stop-start epicness of  "Glass Tambourine".

Throughout the album, you can tell the ladies atop their bulldozer are choosing their targets carefully. Once sighted, it's only a matter of choosing whether to crush it with love, cheekiness or resentment. Sometimes all three at once. "Future Crimes", with it's distorted keyboard melody, yearns for an end to some severe hypocrisy. Brownstein wails over and over, "if you're gonna be a restless soul/then you're gonna be so, so tired/if you're gonna give up on this fight/then i'm gonna call you a liar", cementing the idea that the band, despite their rip-roaring veneer, can be achingly sincere. "Racehorse" is a great use of humor to critique the pitfalls of greed. With a smart-assed confidence, Brownstein sings, "I'm a racehorse/yeah, I'm a racehorse/put your money on me", followed by a purposefully crass chorus, "we're in the money, we're in the money".

The band see's no point in making their delivery any different, regardless of the sentiment behind it. Every emotion is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps the song that best encapsulates this is "Short Version". From the off-hand guitar flourishes to the intense drum fills, you can tell the ladies are cackling loudly as they doze around, kicking their legs off the side in joyful reverie of their destruction. Brownstein yowls off enigmatic phrases like, "Inside this stillness is a wave/a force from which we cannot be saved" and "Inside this heaven is a hell/under this fever we are well".

Eventually, one of the guitars gets stuck on a particularly juicy chord, repeating it over and over, as the other begins to fly high, arpeggiating notes until the cows come home. The band yells in unison, "Okay! Alright!", bringing this soiree of pure energy to it's boiling point. Wild Flag's audio-dozer has shifted to full speed and you can't help but gleefully hang on for dear life. And that's true of the entire album. It's a rough, gratifying ride through the passions of life, navigated by earnest and vibrant women. That's a trip I will gladly take for years to come.

The Passions - Thirty Thousand Feet Over China

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Music from the far corners of the past can surprise you. That is, if you're willing to seek it out. I was reminded of this lesson, when I discovered The Passions last week. I had come upon them by chance, finding their name relegated to a "similar artists" list for Siouxsie and the Banshees on All Music Guide. Scrutinizing the list and listening to some of the other bands, my hope was fading that I'd find a diamond in the rough. The list was populated by bands I either already knew about, or bands whose mediocrity was equal to their obscurity.

It's funny, because in situations like that, where you don't have much prior knowledge to go off of, your criteria for further investigation becomes strangely superficial. Sometimes I won't even click on the link to a band page just because I don't like their name. It's almost like the name itself is wasting my time - which is totally stupid - but that's exactly how I feel. Luckily, The Passions is an endearingly simple name for a band, so I overcame my ignorance and jumped right in to their discography.

I was immediately struck by Thirty Thousand Feet Over China, when I first fired it up on my computer. Cascaded with chorus-slather, echoing guitar and the cloudy vocals of Barbara Gogan, the album is akin to jogging through green mist, down a constantly undulating indoor gym track. The album has a silky, herky-jerk propulsion throughout, where smooth guitar notes float over a rhythm section that sticks fastidiously to reverse-engineered funk. It sounds like the typical recipe for a post-punk pasta, but The Passions pull themselves above most of their contemporaries by simple virtue of cohesive musicianship and energy.

"I'm in Love with a German Film Star", which was the band's one hit before disbanding, opens with some of the richest guitar chords you'll ever hear in your life. Gogan sings, "I'm in love with a German film star, I once saw in a bar/sitting in a corner and in perfect clothes/trying not to pose/ for the cameras and the girls", making no bones about the ridiculousness and inevitability of celebrity obsession. On "The Swimmer", the band misdirects with a slow build, muted guitar echoes and reverse snare splashes, which give way to a rapid guitar flourish. The drums and bass are dragged in tow, while Gogan moans so smoky and rich over the top of it all.

There's a presiding sense of controlled experimentation and indulgence throughout Thirty Thousand Feet Over China. You can hear it chattering on the reverse snares and elongated jam of "Small Stones". You can hear it squeal in the synthesizer highlights of "Runaway". You can hear it sway in the echoed percussion and the flange-muffled tremolo of the guitar on "Skin Deep". You can hear it mince up songs at the beginning and toss songs off at the end. It's a looseness that feels right. Since The Passions' music is a fundamental mix of smooth and groove, any probes into studio trickery are welcome eccentricities, rather than tedious subversions of pop song craft like many other post-punk acts.

Thirty Thousand Feet Over China is not going to change your life or set your ears on fire, but it is a solid album by a band largely forgotten by time. In many ways, the album is a sort of foamy, midnight lullabye, where even the expression of anxiety or disenchantment sound like sweet little nothings in the ears. The Passions may ask you to jump aboard the mood-train, but their skill at constructing songs and weaving in gentle melodies keeps your perspective sober. Overall, the album is a very fine effort that speaks directly to how unfair the amnesia of music culture and history can be.


 

Pizzicato Five - Made in USA

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Pizzicato Five were one of those groups that consistently put out solid albums, yet never went out of their way to create a record of pure ecstasy. In a sense, you could say they managed their creative pizza well, dividing pieces equally across the table - years and years of decent albums, rather than making one or two amazing albums and foddering the rest.

There is a sense of exuberance that has been touched upon by several Japanese music artists from the '90s onward, but none do it quite as cool as Pizzicato Five, and Made in USA is a decent form of proof. It is Matador Records' first compilation of singles and other outstanding tracks pulled from the group's mass career in order for them to properly become acquainted with the U.S. The group's jet-setting '60s image and sound-collage-meets-drum n' bass-bossa-nova style are so effortlessly presented on Made in USA, that even the most heart-hardened listeners would have trouble not cracking a smile at the charm and glitz of it all.

The compilation opens with a breezy jazz shuffle, "I", that instantly transports you to a high-fashion club in swinging '60s Tokyo. Amidst a playful flute and snare swishes, singer Maki Nomiya provides anxious vocal melodies. You can tell she's ready to kick this groovy little set list off with a bang. As the album shimmies forward, the club shifts rapidly into the future and back to it's respective present, snatching up technology and music trends all over the place. "Magic Carpet Ride" introduces a cheerful middle-eastern flavor - synth flute wrapping itself around an electronic drum beat as Nomiya expresses some sweet idealism, "everyday we'll love together/we can make it last forever/ magic carpet ride/magic carpet ride".

"Readymade FM" offers a brief collage of radio jargon and background music, fading quickly into the saccharine chimes of "Baby Love Child". I would argue that "Baby Love Child" is one of Pizzicato Five's best songs, if not THE best. Woven into a measured acoustic guitar, an endless drum loop and punctuating xylophone, the song is a surprising evocation of affection. Nomiya's gentle delivery, which shifts between English and Japanese, is the icing on the sentiment cake, with lines such as "When we kiss, I see what's in your heart/you love me, yes you do/you don't need to tell me", outlining the one-two gooey punch, "we are in love, baby love child/I take you so high, baby love child/give me a kiss, baby love child". It's a song that makes you misty and nostalgic in the best way possible - hell, they even used it at the bittersweet ending of the Futurama episode where Leela first finds out about her true origins.

Made in USA is about possibility and positivity - ideologies that Pizzicato Five championed throughout their entire career. For them, music was both a cure for the soul that ails and a statement of nostalgic fashion as new-found empowerment. Made in USA exemplifies these ideas. It's a radio dial of effervescence - whether you find comfort in the intimate Japanese dialogue of "This Year's Girl #2", chill out to the cool blue groove of "I Wanna' Be Like You" or flail around to the celebratory bombast of the popular single, "Twiggy Twiggy-Twiggy vs. James Bond" - it's a ready-made sound collage of the most adorable proportions.

To some ears, Pizzicato Five may seem ham-fisted and corny. Made in USA is not going to completely convince them otherwise, but it may just give them pause. Being a compilation, the record does suffer from a lack of continuity, even within the typically disparate aesthetics of the group. "Sweet Soul Revue"  and "Go Go Dancer" tread a little to close to the chin with their overblown horn sections and flat song structures. However, it's not enough to sink the ship. The brightest moments of Made in USA send the compilation to the stars, encouraging anyone who is curious about Pizzicato Five to gleefully peruse their back-catalog.