It didn’t matter that it completely alienated working class people like my own family. It didn’t matter that it rendered the left about as seductive as bowel cancer, because it wasn’t about building consensus, it was about propagating as much guilt as humanly possible.
Lias Saoudi, from Ten Thousand Apologies
For the past week I’ve been writing a review of Norman Meehan’s Jenny McLeod: A Life in Music for the Kapralova Society’s journal. This biography of the visionary New Zealand composer was a great read, with more in the way of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll along the way than I expected. Once it’s published I’ll post a link here; there’s more of my writing on classical music, mostly reviews of Kapralova recordings, in the Journal’s past numbers. So, in place of the long-form thoughts that would usually assemble here, I’m quite happy to give you another list of interesting new and old things that have occupied my attention recently.
Frog Power – I’ve reviewed Cosmo Potts’ intricately rough-hewn DIY albums before, here and here. At last, the maestro has spoken, to the Dolby Brothers at Nature’s Worst, an occasional podcast dedicated to the outsiders of New Zealand music. There’s an interview with Vorn, there’s even one with me in the series, but here’s Frog Power to talk about his history, his creative method, and his thoughts on haut cuisine.
And here’s Jeremy’s latest album, the action-packed Snuff Film Blooper Reel.
I’ve been reading Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure to Hayley, and it’s one of those must-read music books, not just a box-ticking name-dropping exercise in sales like, say, Johnny Marr’s book. This band are right up against it. The drugs are too much and too many, the sex too onstage, the personalities too outrageously combative to be dull. Most of the story is patched together by Adele Stripe with a bold pretense at eye-of-God objectivity, and maybe a third is in Lias Saoudi’s own words. The bit where he discovers cancel culture is angrily hilarious (here’s the edited version of the Pitchfork post that provoked him). This, and my opening quote, are merely a selection from the best polemic against mob-activated mediocrity yet committed to print.
Artists who were willing to demonstrate fealty to this atomising double bind of moronic sentimentality and cold-blooded commercialism would be rewarded, anyone calling it into question risked being labelled a racist, a misogynist or worse. That the artist is not their art might well be the only rule of art-making, it’s what grants permission to march across the borders and look back at your position in the universe with fresh perspective. It’s what lends it critical power. Having thrown metaphor and humour into the trash, this new breed of hyper-literal thought-police gave up trying to separate evisceration from endorsement. Too much risk involved. God knows who it might offend? In these heady days what was required was safety art: the antithesis of the band we had created.
Here's Hayley’s favourite song; she’s pointed out that the meaning of leather in the lyric is aspirational rather than merely perverse; “left wing skin on the right wing leather” predicts an entree into high society that did, incredibly, materialize after this:
I look forward to a time when we can recognize those artists and critics who held the line, rightly or wrongly, who cares, against the dire “safety art”, and forget all about the safety artists and their apologists..
Death and the Maiden are a Dunedin band who deny all links to the Verlaines song and forge instead a modern music that combines a post-punk aesthetic with dance electronica. Their 2018 album Wisteria was great enough, but what pushes today’s Uneven Ground far higher is Lucinda King’s decision to bring her singing up in the mix and make it as good as she possibly can, begging us to care about her words, making us complicit in the songs. Finally, not the Dunedin sound.
Which reminds me of the 2011 Grimes album Darkbloom that I found the other day in the Flying Nun shop. It’s confusing that there’s a Flying Nun and Flying Out shop within spitting distance of each other both spatially and thematically in Auckland,1 and it’s confusing that Grimes’ Darkbloom was originally one side of a split LP with d’Eon, whose songs are interestingly of their time, but lack the focus Grimes brings to her art. In her five cuts on Darkbloom, she ups the ante from 2010’s Halfax, the electronica departure from her freak-folk roots on Geidi Prime, to create the softly beating dance sound that’s been the basis for most of her work since. Having particular fun with her vocals, already the disembodied voice-in-the-cloud, the spectral digital feminine of her future work. What Grimes did for electronica, and did by herself, on Darkbloom has spread through the culture, and there are traces of it in Uneven Ground, just as surely as there are traces of it in brat.
In this graveyard of music journalism, one path to keeping up with the popular artforms is to check in with William Dart’s New Horizons over on RNZ. I’m glad I did. William is the last master standing of the in-depth analysis of notable new work in our country. He recently introduced Beth Gibbons’ new album by not only playing from the version of Henryk Górecki’s 3rd Symphony of Sorrowful Songs she recorded with Kristof Penderecki, but also giving his honest opinion of this most popular of modern classical works, in a way that heightened the impact of the Pendecki/Gibbons version. The show that caught my attention was devoted to the new album, the first in seven years, from The High Llamas, Hey Panda.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/concert/programmes/newhorizons/audio/2018932675/the-high-llamas-transcend
The High Llamas is the long-term avant-pop project of Sean O’Hagan, who it would be fair to call the Paul McCartney to Cathal Coughlan’s John Lennon in Microdisney, especially if you’re a McCartney fan. Dart asks us to surrender to Hey Panda, don’t ask it questions, just soak it up and it will deliver, and he’s right. There are traces of O’Hagan’s Celtic soul styling and Brian Wilson influence to remind us of the Microdisney sound, but everywhere the music is being carried off on the tide of modernism, with lovely autotune vocals, plug‘n’b beats, and keyboard touches here and there that remind me of Jockstrap, the outfit I only heard because Cathal Coughlan recommended them in one of his last interviews. Hey Panda, in other words, is what you get when old ears can make good sense of new sounds and fold them into a long-evolving tradition of beauty.
Arab Strap’s new album I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a f*** anymore 👍 does a similar trick with its subject matter, the social media ecosystem. A pair of indie also-rans I never gave a second thought (I probably gave them a listen once after that Belle and Sebastian song) have made an impressive contribution to the “internet music about the internet” genre. You get gruff, contemptuous Scottish sing-speak that’s actually perfect for this particular set of lyrics and a clever and often fiery set of indie rock beats that puts variety under them (I bought the 1996 Babybird CD Ugly Beautiful from an op shop the other day and thought “actually, these beats aren’t bad”, and Arab Strap have modernized and overdriven that bedroom auteur recording style, which when you think about it is also a perfect fit for this project).
I woke up this morning and opened you up
With a squeeze and a tender caress
We locked horns right away, I was shit on your shoe
I took a dressing down before I got dressed
I come to you for confirmation, testimony, adulation
Education, excitation, palpitation and flirtation
But you give me aggravation, insult and disinformation
Hatred, bias and predation, suicidal ideation
You take all my time, you take all my strength, you steal my love
You are the worst friend I've ever had
I let you inside, I follow you blind, I take your lead
Now I am a distant pal, an absent dad
My fingerprints all over your body
Your talons dug into my mind
My nucleus accumbens is putty in your hands
So go easy on me, please, be kind
Flying Out’s decor is white, Flying Nun’s is black, but these shops sell much the same stock in much the same way. Are they in subtly passive-aggressive competition, or are they two halves of a possibly inefficient monopoly? I think we should be told.
"...who deny all links to the verlaines song", good, that song is terrible lol