The Album is a Social Construct

Akriila, Louisa Nicklin, Momus, Anna Coddington, Wet Specimen, Magdalena Bay

Head of the Lioness, Théodore Géricault 1821

But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: "It's clever, but is it Art?"

~ Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops

One of those periodic waves of Spotify hating was passing across the internet, and I was trying not to get involved. Complaining about Spotify is like complaining about the vaccine - we get it, you’re powerless in the face of technocracy, you want to be counted, you want to do things your way, but as long as the Vax/Spotify works your opinions and any side effects you may be experiencing are insignificant. Powerlessness to this degree is a powerful incentive to dishonesty, intellectual or otherwise, and this is where it gets annoying. For example, outrage that Spotify will no longer pay out (did it ever, really?) on tracks with fewer than 1000 plays. No-one tweeting about this seems to care that YouTube doesn’t pay out until you have 1000 subscribers (plus 4000 public watch hours in the last 12 months), a far higher bar, being applied to work that often has a significant visual content (and therefore greater production cost). But Spotify refused to cancel/censored Joe Rogan! Or Van Morrison! Um, but YouTube, isn’t that where all those missing brain cells were last seen? Besides, Van was right about Facebook.

If people persist in the illusion that YouTube is run by Hobbits while Spotify is run by Orcs, it’s because YouTube is the irreplaceable commons, and its survival as such is already miraculous, while Spotify is vulnerable to competitors that offer an only slightly different experience. If I really like a piece of music, I’ll buy it on Bandcamp (not that I can afford this often, please consider upgrading your subscription), but I’ll keep streaming it on Spotify because who doesn’t want to see their stream count go up.

The piece of Spotify hate I really didn’t get is that someone somewhere wrote something I didn’t read about how the platform is “killing the album”. Really? If I want to stream an album (and only an album) that’s easy (though back when I was trying to use a free account on my phone it was indeed impossible). But, the album is a social construct. It belongs to a particular phase of technology; before 1966 all albums were compilations, like your playlists, or studio recordings of live sets (the Beach Boys didn’t make an “album” till Pet Sounds), and after the invention of the CD they became bloated things full of longueurs and skippable extras. The Beatles may have invented The Album as high art with Sgt Peppers, but ‘Strawberry Fields/ Penny Lane’ wasn’t on it, nor ‘I Am the Walrus’ which I heard on the double 7” EP that was all the Beatles I could afford with my pocket money.

The other day Hayley and I were watching the episode of CHIPs where Ponch inhales nitrous oxide, a not particularly accurate representation it must be said, and near the end of its rambling story one of the patrolmen started singing Lesley Gore’s ‘Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows’.¹ So we YouTubed the original, and it’s a great performance, as are ‘You Don’t Own Me’ and “It’s my Party’. You know these, they’re canonical works - so what’s your favourite Lesley Gore album?² What’s your favourite Gene Pitney album? If you have a favourite Motown album you’re a nerd not a fan. Half the stars in those 70’s History of Pop magazines that attempted to codify our understanding of the genre weren’t people who thought in terms of the album. Should pop stars even make albums today? It’s not usually what they do best, and if you prefer your own compilations, I don’t blame you. Not everyone can make an album that’s an adventure from beginning to end - an El Dorado, a Velvet’s self-titled 3rd album, or a Wolf City. (don’t post Album of the Year lists in July ever again, people). But then, an album did drop last week that hit me with AOTY vibes and it got me thinking about some recent albums that might also be fun to write about.

Last week I was so impressed by AKRIILA’s single ‘para siempre (｡ᐳ﹏ᐸ)’ that I not only included it in my discussion of ELO and Olivia Newton John, but also listened to every other Akriila release on Spotify, especially her first mixtape 001, which (in terms of music I really like that I’ve already written about) hit me like a cross between Rosalia and Stunna Girl, assertive trap with plugg sounds, an occasional reggaeton feel, and cool melodic autotune on the final track ‘DESPERTAR’. Another Akrilla album, epistolares, was due to drop in a couple of days, with a countdown clock on the artist’s Spotify page - and if the artists take the platform this seriously, I’m with them. Dave Moore’s described ‘para siempre (｡ᐳ﹏ᐸ)’ as “landfill hyperpop”, equating the outward spread of hyperpop production with the spread of generic indie rock across the world, or the spread of garage R’n’B and psych in the 60’s that gave us the Nuggets and Pebbles compilation albums of one-off regional releases, but I’m going to coin “second wave hyperpop” to describe what Dave and I both feel is the best part of the genre, that is, its extension away from its hectic neo-prog roots into other vital genres - trap, metal, pop, industrial and on epistolares, reggaeton, plugg, and drum ’n’ bass (an essential ingredient in first-wave hyperpop). It’s full of the production moments - autotune fantasias, percussion blowouts, filter sweeps, skittery drum breaks - that make me laugh and clap my hands like a child, but once applied across Latin jazz feels - the Fender Rhodes hasn’t sounded this fresh in 50 years - and crisply defined reggaeton beats it often acquires a groovy laid-back quality, affirmed by the occasional drop into soft harp textures, brief moments of peace, like quiet sunlit glades met while crossing a noisy jungle.

Last week I joked that ELO were hyperpop pioneers, and I stand by that, but no-one got closer to the modern sound than Rasputina did on ‘AntiqueHighHeelRedDollShoes’ (Cabin Fever, 2002) - compare with Akriila’s ‘NANA フリーク版’.

The whole AOTY deal is sealed when epistolares ends with, after a few seconds of industrial bass tease, a strummed flamenco guitar, an untreated vocal, just a sprinkling of heavenly keys, and a little 3/4 guitar-back drumming; in the album’s ‘Afterhours’ moment, the gorgeous ‘carta a mi papá’. It doesn’t matter that this album is going to be loved by millions of people who won’t get that VU reference. That’s our language, I don’t understand theirs, and I don’t need to just yet, I’ve refrained from translating any of these lyrics which work so perfectly on their own, alien terms that whatever they say, I already approve of.

Music in itself is privileged to be a kind of spiritual Esperanto, the purest diplomatic language.

~ Vítězslava Kaprálová

And now for something completely different, an album of electric guitar textures, vocals that are largely untreated, and proper drum kits; some very serious music from our far less serious country, but nonetheless an album with something in common with Akriila’s, which is a bold collaboration with producers and co-stars capable of taking her music into the unexpected places it needed to go, full of the thrill and joy of collaboration that’s off to one side of the commercial imperative. Which is something I also hear in Louisa Nicklin’s The Big Sulk, produced by Shayne P Carter, who Nicklin has entrusted with her introspective, sometimes Thom Yorke-ish art songs to a gratifying extent. This is a record where every single guitar note sounds rich and meaningful, and where Nicklin’s voice is met by these guitars on its journeys and set within them wonderfully. I especially like those vocal moments where Carter has pushed Nicklin to ride the thin edge of her upper register for a while, and the louder tracks like the drum-heavy rocker ‘Thick’, with just the right effect on the voice, under which Carter’s guitar bubbles and boils, and a disarmingly metal-ish tempo change at the end.

A couple of blogs ago I shared a track from Momus’ new album Ballyhoo, which was being drip-fed onto the streamers, and here it is on Bandcamp more-or-less complete. It may not be the best Momus album (I can hardly find time to listen to them all), it may not even be the best Momus album we get this year, but I’ve enjoyed it very much, especially ‘The Fox in Winter’, with its wry appreciation of ageing libertinage.

You keep the fox with love
He loves you back with heat
And he may still snatch victory
From the jaws of self-defeat
He spins the lovely tales
You struggle to believe
Of where he’s been and what he’s done
But you know he’ll never leave

To leave would be to fail
To leave would be a fall
The fox would be a fool
He’d lose it all
To leave would be to choose
To choose to lose
Exchanging happiness
For wilderness

Hello everybody I’m the fox in winter
It’s me everybody I’m the fox in winter
Wandering alone, if it weren’t for you
To stop me doing what I want to do

Ballyhoo’s description reads “An album exploring AI composition tools and influenced by K-Pop.” K-Pop is something that has passed me by and left me unmoved, because rather a lot of it has been presented to me by the gatekeeper media, and, like other battery-farmed produce, I’ve found it relatively flavourless (the best example so far, Lisa’s ‘Rockstar’, feels to me like a pale imitation of RAF Kelly’s underheard V-Pop classic ‘JETSKI’). Whereas J-Pop, which no gatekeeper media has brought to my attention, which I’ve only stumbled across through random associations and untrustworthy algorithms, often strikes me as wonderful and authentic, anarchically scandalous, subversive and inventive, and I wonder if what made the global media industry so keen on K-Pop specifically was the assurance that the artists and the product could be controlled.
Momus himself collaborated with a stable of J-Pop artists in the 199O’s, one of whom, Kahimi Karie, had a #1 hit with his ‘Good Morning World’ in 1995.

So the man knows his stuff, and if he wants to let K-Pop inspire him and AI move the knobs and find the plug-ins he’s certainly earned the right. There’s a lot of good material on Ballyhoo and the more I hear it the more I like it, and go back again to read the lyrics and listen closer to details like the feminized backing vocals of ‘Three Trapped Tigers’, possibly AI-generated from his own because there’s no bv credit, or the Prince-like studio funk of ‘Catchy’.

Speaking of The Purple One, I’ve been favourably disposed to Anna Coddington’s music since hearing the Clicks version of ‘Pink Frost’, where her vocal sells Dick Johnson’s arrangement of doof doof beats and TD-3 bassline. Not long after I discovered that, William Dart played, on New Horizons, L A Mitchel’s ‘Glove’, a song co-written with Coddington, and I heard something that might pass the Akriila test, that is, a song that might still sound good even if I didn’t understand the language it’s sung in.

This led me to Coddington’s Te Whakamiha, a funk album largely sung in te reo Māori, which therefore needs to pass that test, and often does, for instance on ‘Kahurangi’.

I’ve heard too many songs in te reo that have seemed weighted down by the mana of the language, worried about scandalizing one’s teacher, whānau, tīpuna., or Te Māngai Pāho (to be fair, there are also far too many such songs being made here in English right now), and pop can’t work like that, a singer needs to feel liberated from social expectations and free to play with her text and find her audience. Coddington manages it here (and her band is on fire) and I await the tide of global M-Pop, airwaves filling with te reo lyrics sounding as free as Akriila’s Spanish, aprxel’s Vietnamese, Erika Isac’s Romanian.³

In other news, The New Existentialists, my own crew, have recorded another 4 tracks with Matthew Heine, giving us 12 in total (this includes some songs already released, but such is the way of things now). That is, an album, and, if we can find a co-operative label, an LP. We’re playing a couple of gigs - at Cupid Bar in Pt Chev Auckland on the 31st 30th no sorry actually the 21st! September, and at the Crown in Dunedin on Sat 12th October. Supporting us at the Crown are newcomers Pearly, 2023 Ca$h Guitar collaborators Children’s Letters to God, and Wet Specimen, the three-piece led by Lucy Hunter from former global sensation Opposite Sex. Lucy played keys with The Puddle on one of our last tours, and was so good at learning my songs that we ended up with a repertoire of 20 or so, then played the lot in Christchurch (the Puddle and i.e. crazy were supporting The Bats) by cutting them all down to two minutes each, long before that was the fashion. October’s booking has led me to give Wet Specimen’s 2021 album Wet Dreamin’ another listen. Damn if this isn’t just about the most existential thing I’ve ever heard.

Abraxas takes his shining whip above his head,
Brandished violence, broader time
His magic could evaporate the light from your body,
It could burn you,
It could boil out the colour in your eyes

The ant-Abaraxes tell me how I should
Take vitamins or die before my time,
While the Zemblans sit there quietly, just grinning, praying,
Warding off the demons dancing in our eyes,
Imagining hellfire

Ah ah, Bixtemaridna,
He’s persuasive, chest of sinew, serpent thighs
But I don’t believe in fate,
We will find out what will happen in the future if we wait a while

’Abraxas’ fills a churning acid-rock groove with a grimoire of demons, to make its wise, brave points about the nature of life. Its playfulness belies its chthonic aspects; this is Hunter’s method, truths about life set within a fantasy world. The Wet Specimen musical method is also well-represented in this track. Her voice has a precocious quality, the pained defiance of unheard Cassandra, with a glissando - an effect that elsewhere too often sounds desultory - of great intentionality and precision.⁴ It’s all very human, combined with her tuneful way around the bass guitar, so much so that any vulnerability has to be offset, criticized even, by Reg Norris’s elemental guitar, which throws sheets of granite and waves of fire at it, like the hostile world its humanity briefly prevails in.

One wonders what the inspiration for this music is, what models it follows. ‘Heaven’s Gate’ has a Broadcast quality, and lyrically Hunter has something in common with Melora Creager’s gothic fairy tales, and really quite a lot in common with Momus too, e.g. ‘Boyfriends’, but there’s little else I can point to, or even surmise about. It’s the same sui generis quality of invention that made Opposite Sex remarkable, yet somehow familiar, the first time Ian and I heard them, supporting The Puddle in Gisborne circa 2009.

There are many ways to discover new music, and Hayley occasionally brings something choice to my attention, sometimes by saying “this sounds God-awful, I bet you’re going to love it”, which was the case with Magdalena Bay and their just-released album Imaginal Disk. Here’s unapologetically babydoll-voiced synthpop with second-wave hyperpop touches, improving the A-Pop game considerably over the usual suspects.

If you watch Magdalena Bay’s What’s In My Bag, filmed two years ago, you’ll see two people looking for inspiration everywhere they can. It takes a lot of ingredients to make their pie, fantastic (on a first listen - this is brand new to me) but getting a little sweet for me over the length of an album (qualified heirs to ELO and Olivia Newton John, they could definitely soundtrack a remake of Xanadu). Anyone who likes King Crimson’s Red and Starless and Bible Black as much as Outkast’s Speakerboxx/The Love Below is okay by me. I’d like to think that every one of these albums, from R.E.M. to Kylie Minogue, found its place in Imaginal Disk

1. It was unusual to hear music from the real world in films and TV made before Martin Scorsese made readymade popular song an essential part of the film experience.

2. California Nights (1967) sounds perfect to me, good songs, great singing and Turtle-ish pop arrangements, but look at the way the song titles are listed on the front cover, the “album” concept hasn’t quite hit yet. Even Pet Sounds fails the cover art test. For the next generation, the CD industry is going to reduce album cover art to microscopic dimensions, reproduce it poorly, and stick it behind a scuffed plastic screen.

3. There are 190,000 Māori speakers in the world, 25,000,000 Romanian speakers, 86,000,000 Vietnamese speakers, 500,000,00 Spanish speakers and 400,000,000 English speakers with another 1,500,000,000 people knowing English as a second language.

4. Graham Reid once pissed Lucy off on the internet by reviewing her voice as “little girl lost” and I’ve remembered that often in these pages as I’ve tried to depict the styles of female singers.