Absolument moderne!

New releases from Cuticles, P.H.F., Frog Power, Devendra Banhart, Jockstrap and Ian Starr.

The Mound of Humanity, 1987, Helm Ruifrok

Il faut être absolument moderne.
Arthur Rimbaud, Adieu

Modernity, once held in abeyance, comes in spurts; its very approach to technology is disruptive and unpredictable. An example I was reminded of recently is the DIY wave of early post-punk; bands like The Desperate Bicycles, Swell Maps, The Raincoats, Television Personalities, Warsaw, The Fall releasing their own 7” records (or what still looked like self-releases after the likes of Rough Trade began to organise their distribution). Musicians on the fringes had always done this, with their efforts ignored and forgotten, but the anyone-can-do-this, us-against-them sprit of punk created a network of artists and fans willing to support each other’s efforts for long enough to push any number of innovations into the mainstream cultural spotlight. Before you know it, Scritti Politti and Joy Division are having actual hits, and The Fall will become second only to the Royal Family as a British institution.

I was reminded of this era by a remarkable LP document from Cuticles, Major Works, released a couple of weeks ago on Siltbreeze, label of splendidly perseverant oddball impresario and Kiwi-lover Tom Lax. Cuticles formed in Oamaru when two former members of the Trendeez, a band I’d never heard, joined forces with Lisa Preston, who as a member of Nux Vomica played organ on one of the best self-released 7”s of the 1980’s New Zealand DIY scene, ‘My Life To Live/TV Producer’, its raw sound influenced by American garage punk as well as the UK DIY acts.
Nearly 40 years later, that spark caught fire again; as the Cuticles press release puts it,

The main mechanic utilised was the twin song writing styles of Plunkett/ Preston with their combined voices over short and ragged mildly deranged tunes. The songs came in a giddy rush and recording ensued when and where possible.

Cuticles songs have the feel of 80’s DIY songs, especially Swell Maps and the early Fall; there are no lead breaks, instead rhythm guitars play clashing chord changes, the organ intercedes between them, and new harmonic sense is forged out of these conflicts, with a tension that keeps each song fresh and original – and the songs are short, often around 2 minutes, like the best 2023 music. Modernity delayed is still modernity, whether it’s some Fire In The Attic release of a long-lost recording from an unheard long-dead innovator, or fire in a bottle for 40 years, recorded by people who obviously had fun uncorking it, and released as if it’s needed right now, which, gratifyingly, is exactly how Major Works is being received.

P.H.F.’s Purest Hell made one of the great statements of Kiwi modernism in 2022 by swathing its slinky rock tunes in hyperpop synth and drum sounds; a choice perfect for the album’s theme of grief and remembrance, as I discussed earlier this year. A new P.H.F. track Love Yourself, maybe an outtake from Purest Hell, has turned up on a compilation mixtape from the USA, Hardcore Will Never Die, and Neither Will You, and it works the same magic, pulling us this way and that, stripmining an emotional substratum. Yet Love Yourself doesn’t really sound like the rest of the compilation, the gravitas Joe Locke bring to his work is at odds with Hardcore’s spirit of experimentation without much concern for melody, mood and meaning. If, as I think, hyperpop, influenced by the freshest and deepest of prior forms, is the new rock’n’roll, then “hardcore” or “happy hardcore”, as this album has been tagged, is its skiffle. [Addendum: in Poppy's house in Dunedin I found a double LP called Black Riot, early jungle rave and hardcore, and on this there's a track by The Terrorist called RK1 from 1996, a dance track with bass and drum sounds not unlike some on Purest Hell. So now I think Hardcore Will Never Die is a retro exercise, and that I was right about the skiffle stage intermediate between jungle and hyperpop, which is in part the application of dance music techniques to songwriting, and that once again modernity involves the reduction of childhood enjoyments]

In the Kurt Vile tradition of artists literally making a name by parodying their betters, we have Alice Gas, reminding me to listen to Pussy Riot collaborator and Crystal Castles survivor Alice Glass again, but Gas is among dozens of musicians here devoted to being brand spanking new and in all probability some of them are going to be huge.

What P.H.F. do with state-of-the-art technology, Frog Power’s Jeremy “Cosmo” Potts does with some kind of bootleg bedroom set-up I don’t begin to understand; he can take your broken second-hand autotune, plug it into a bleeping synth and it sounds good as new, doesn’t it? south dunedin astral projection seminar is a follow-up to 2022’s chicken necks (for rope), which I raved about at the time, but may be an even better album; instead of some instant hits and a little filler, we get more complex songs, full of original structural ideas, and some spectacular drumming well deployed, with lyrics hidden in the mix and giving out just enough intrigue to make you want to seek them out with another listen. On ‘pariah’ and ‘hare krishna in the club’, with its new-old rock’n’roll riff, Cosmo hints at absolument moderne forms, and indeed his project could be seen as merging modern studio technique (in its No 8 wire approximation) with the rock he loved growing up – I hear echoes of The Pixies and the Cardigans here, and ‘satan takes the reigns’ even evokes the best bit of peak Flaming Lips. Several of these tracks have found musique concrete voice overs, and I’m guessing the speaker on ‘Star Spangled Hammer’ is GG Allin, a man few guessed at the time would become sadly missed; the song itself seems like a celebration of US rock’s darker moments, exactly what we need right now to resist Taylor Swift and the poptimist hordes.

Devendra Banhart’s Mala was the best 2012 album, summing up modernity then with its polymorphous wit and cosmopolitan pop eloquence (“this one’s for the dad bands that know it” over the ‘Twist And Shout’ variation of ‘Hatchet Wound’); but his career since then has seemed a progress of self-effacement. This has been ignored by the critics, whom one assumes weren’t that into his earlier work; one of the things that made it special was his puckish willingness to offend us in all directions, toasting then-girlfriend Natalie Portman in ‘Shabop Shalom’ by means of erotic Judaic imagery

Your sweet supple breasts are golden ghettos,
soft statues in stilettos.
Two wise men instead of three.

Whenever I'm in a foul mood,
I gotta' see you in your Talmud
and so happy it makes me,
you wanna know who,
who wrote the Book of Job?
She wants to know,
"Who, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Well I did, I did.

Or ‘Little Yellow Spider’

And hey there, little sexy pig, you made it with a man
And you're got a little kid with hooves instead of hands

Or

I see so many
Little boys I want to marry
I see plenty
Little kids I'll get to have

Words which had to make it onto Cripple Crow because Devendra was worried about becoming popular and being used for background music in Starbucks. But now, that’s what he wants, or more likely accepts – Flying Wig sounds like the background music in some waiting lounge in purgatory where people have to stand around wishing they were dancing.

It's the withdrawal of his nourishing toxicity, the assumption of a maturity no doubt sincere but also eventless, compensated by an obsession with finish, with textures, with text but not with chord changes, melodies, lyrical hooks; the early works were bold struggles against perfectionism, Flying Wig is surrender to nothing but. On 2009’s What Will We Be, a song called ‘16th & Valencia Roxy Music’ is an exciting bit of eurodisco worthy of its title, and there are similar things on Mala. The influence of Roxy Music is all over Flying Wig, but it’s their slowest, least exciting, most studio perfection obsessed side, combined with the drone of late Eno. Certainly producer Cate Le Bon has done this well, but she’s performed miracles for words and music that for the most part lack intrinsic interest and are being downplayed as much as possible, like some Zen exercise in ego dilution.

It's getting harder to sing
Impossible things
I ran away from the place
Where I stand
(Sirens)

Well it looks like I've lost my charger
My charger's gone away
It looks like you've lost your hunger
Your hunger's gone away
(Charger)

These songs, whatever else they are about, are songs about writer’s block; but any such flaw in their perfection is lost on the gatekeeper press, who have been fawning over Flying Wig as if they are going to listen to it again. Thus, Pitchfork’s E.R. Pulgar rates the album a 6.9 and talks of Devendra’s “endearing eccentricity”, actually one of his expected qualities that’s missing here. Pulgar’s review links to a Bustle astrology article on the “divine feminine” that reads like 19^th century German gender theory before Johann Jakob Bachofen shook things up; if you’ve been paying attention to this blog you’ll know that the divine feminine has a bit more to offer than the mere negation of one’s masculine godhead.
Pitchfork also gives the new Rolling Stones album Hackney Diamonds 4.5 and excoriates it at length, but it’s more rewarding and less self-indulgent than Flying Wig – it’s a better album than we had any right to expect, and there is more of the male “divine feminine” on it, courtesy of Mick Jagger, whom Andrew Loog Oldham once described as “a puma with a gender of its own”. The Stones are being told to act their age, not their image, but age, like gender, is just a number – image is forever.

Jockstrap, the exciting collaboration between Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye, combines elements of jazz, folk, pop and electronic dance music, which sounds awful but they’ve smashed them together so hard that the synthesis creates a sound that’s sui generis. Thus, there’s a distinctive Jockstrap chord, and a distinctive Jockstrap melodic line; Jockstrap stand in much the same relation to modern pop music as Bartók did to modern classical music; and, like Bartók, Taylor Skye is an ethnomusicologist, a student of all aspects of electronic culture, and every other Jockstrap project is his remix of the last one. Thus, I<3UQTINVU is a remix of the fantastic 2022 album I Love You Jennifer B, but unlike the previous remix album Beavercore features an array of guest stars - Babymorocco, Coby Sey, Kirin J Callinan, and Ian Starr, who features on the best of the two tracks from I<3UQTINVU released as a preview, ‘Red Eye’.

Ravepunk pioneer Starr is the kind of rapper/producer we like, poking the extremes of sound and meaning and making subject matter of his “digital upbringing” on his 2020 debut album 777starrdust & Th3 S3v3n D3adly S1ns of Th3 1nt3rn3t. The last time I wrote about Jockstrap I drew attention to their (relatively speaking, but you know what I mean) high art recapitulation of great low art achievements, and I hear the same thing in ‘Red Eye’, Starr’s screamo vocal blasted into shards by Skye’s autotune, and supported by the grandeur of Jockstrap’s chords, till it reminds us of trap metal, albeit in some fairground ghost train incarnation. As with the Hardcore Will Never Die compilation, we can call the new music, springing up in diverse communities, by many different names, and wonder if its practitioners are aware of the other variants. Which makes this an exciting time to be alive in, don’t you think, a time we can still get a decent new Rolling Stones album at the same time as something, many things, as unrecognizably shocking as the Stones were to the dinosaurs of their heyday.

Longform algorithmic push - ‘climax​/​mwr (RAGE II)’ by Intersekt