Emika – Drop the Other


Ninja Tune (2010)

Listen to the songs here.

With little more than a modest piano motif to announce its arrival, ‘Drop the Other’ is quite the eerily seductive gem from Ninja Tune debutante Emika. It’s one of those songs that reminds you of something, but you’re not sure exactly what. And the thought process that triggers embeds the song in your head. Listening again, and again, as you attempt to pinpoint the source of familiarity – too clear and crisp for Portishead, too emotionally involving for ‘King of My Castle’ – is less something you don’t mind than it is a pure pleasure. You get drawn into its world of deceit and self-doubt.

There is certainly an air of cool melancholy pervading this one, as increasingly numerous clipped minor-key melodies spiral downward among isolated bass stabs like so many coptering seeds helplessly plummeting from a monochrome sycamore tree. Her vocals are interesting: I’m not sure whether Berliner Emika is not that comfortable singing in English, or if this is a conscious aesthetic decision, but there’s an endearing mumble to her delivery that adds tons to the rather demure emoting that goes on. Even the beat starts off unsure of itself, nestling next to the melody as though it’s not really supposed to be there. It’s ‘The Book Group’, but set in one of Distance’s album cover tower blocks; paranoid and winter-bleached: ‘[you] assured me that everything I need was waiting / I’m so stupid…’

Scuba‘s ‘Vulpine’ remix of the track may improve on the original. Its woodblock-echo grandfather clock beat and cooling tower-didgeridoo melody transmute the ennui into cold menace while automatons inhale through their teeth, Hannibal Lecter-like, in the shadows. Somewhat interestingly, there is a brief rising sound halfway through, unconscious symbolism of the greater confidence exuded by Emika on the remix. She’s dropped into the K-hole, disembodied and reverberating through fractal-filled tunnels, an extra life in Scuba’s game of Rez. ‘If you’ve really got faith, then I know you’ll invest”s ultimatum is more serious this time, born of being free from the emotional ties rooting her into reality in the original mix’s fear of letting go. If Emika was trapped in an unhealthy relationship in her own song, Scuba has released her, even if it is into overdosed denial. A fantastic one-two.

Super!

So I still haven’t played SFIV. I don’t even have a console to play it on. But that doesn’t stop me from being very excited about this. It’s like that, but more, apparently. Good enough for me. I think, after waiting too long (I had initially tested myself to see if I could last throughout 2006 – or was it 2007? – without buying a new home console), that 2010 will be the year I finally join this gaming generation. And you can bet your butt that I’ll be getting this in as soon as I do.

I dread to think how many versions of Streetfighter I have bought since 1993. Lots…

Blackjazz

So I was sent the new Shining album last night, and I listened to it on the way home today. Well, most of it. It was a lovely experience: increasingly rarely as I age do I get the chance to indulge in that exciting first listen to a album for which I’ve waited. And I have waited for this one for three years. I first heard their last one, Grindstone (2007), back when I was a big downloader, in January ’07. (As it was such an early album for that year, I have to admit it suffered when it came to the end-of-year festivities. Recency innit! Not sure where it should have been, mind. Higher) And so I hear this new one in January of this year. Obviously. Shining are a cool band. They’re probably the coolest rock band going, and they probably have been for a few years now. This new one is a hell of a lot more metal than their past couple of efforts, which straddled jazz and massive, soundtracky, rock rather smartly. It’s nice to see them nail their colours to one flagpole, if that’s the right metaphor.

The main difference is the vocals, of which there are loads on this new one. They tend to be of the growly, effects-drenched variety, and seem effective. I have rather a bad habit of making loads of comparisons in my reviews, so I’m gonna attempt to get that out of my system somewhat in this post. So: the singing is a bit reminiscent of Steve Austin’s (not that one) late 1990s work in Today Is The Day. Austin used to pretty much stuff a microphone in his mouth when singing, which made it sound really noisy and high-pitched as load of feedback happened. Nick Terry, then-editor of Terrorizer, compared the sound he made to a giant, buzzing insect. And that’s bang on the money. Rather less on the money was Terry’s assertion that TITD’s Temple of the Morning Star (1997) was as though Neurosis‘ Through Silver in Blood had been chopped into bite-sized chunks, when that most definitely was not the case. TITD’s record was a more calculated attempt to shock than the Oakland sextet’s force-of-nature delivery. I think he was just trying so see the best in their record, as he made similar comparisons when reviewing Bloodlet’s The Seraphim Fall*, the next year. I don’t blame him: we all wanted something as good as TSiB to emerge. It just never actually did. Plus, I kind of have to let him off because he was a bloody fantastic reviewer. Anyway, the combination of rasping, effected vocals and epic music reminds me also of Samael, but I have less to say about them, so let’s move on.

There is a definite awareness here. I don’t want to accuse primary composer and main man Jørgen Munkeby of being a copyist with these comparisons, as that is clearly not the case. However, Munkeby is a very intelligent writer and evidently a student of the heavy metal game. So it comes as little surprise to spot various Scandinavian metal reference points. The mix of throaty roar and brutal music is a tad reminiscent of the awesome early Haunted stuff, albeit slowed from the Swedish band’s uptempo thrash and with added charisma. The crisp production and off-kilter riffing put me in mind, in places, of Meshuggah’s often mesmerising polyrhythmic assault, only a heck of a lot more varied. I think there were some more, but I’m being a bit silly. I’m not sure many other people would think the album sounds at all like The Haunted, Samael or Meshuggah, any more than it would Misery Loves Co. or Entombed. But I think there is a loose unifying thread running through the dark, often monstrously powerful, brand of Scandinavian metal. Are Samael even Scandinavian? *looks* Nope, Swiss. Well there you are.

So Shining are a lot more metal than they were. There were hints of it on their older records, in the atmsphere, the wild dynamic swings, the sense of revelling in how they harnessed musical power, even the font. But it’s not in a retro, kitsch, sense, like Mastodon, Kylesa, Melvins, even sunnO))). Though they’re hoary old rockers with a doomy background, I don’t include Harvey Milk, as you can tell a lot of method lies in their ostensibly redneck madness. Which is in stark contrast to the Melvins, whose last two albums (2006, 2008) sound not dissimilar to their 1993 and 1994 efforts. Shining, like the ‘Milk, learn from metal’s past rather than merely repeating it. But they are way more modern in their approach, and not just aesthetically. It’s in the crisp production as compared to the sludge of Harvey Milk (which admittedly does work for them). And, yes, the jazz influence does help in that, as it does Dillinger Escape Plan, who are as technically impressive, aesthetically sussed and genuinely exciting. Except the advantage Shining enjoy over DEP is that Munkeby is comfortably more charming than DEP’s sometimes overbearingly jockish Greg Puciato. I am super-looking forward to their new album too, though, due in March.

Pretend I said something about sunnO))) being really great, but not so great that I stop thinking they’re being just a tiny bit cynical in their super-super-metal aesthetic. And about Genghis Tron being beloved by me, but their combination of electronica and heavy metal not sitting as well with each other as they do on Shining’s record. But that’s kinda the point with GT; the juxtaposition of Plone/AFX-ish electronica melodies with the all-out cybergrind onslaught, with no half-measures. And, I must admit, it did work incredibly well on the obscenely exciting Dead Mountain Mouth (2006). (Believe me, if I did an ‘albums in the year 2006’ post, like I should have done, DMM would have been top 5. Easy.) Follow-up, Board Up the House, was very satisfying in its own right, but felt somewhat like a halfway – err – house between the binary metal of DMM and the all-out eclecticism you feel they eventually want to achieve.** Anyway, I’m off to bed, so I’ll just say Blackjazz rocks. Some people might be disappointed that it’s not superficially as eclectic as the last couple of records, but I think it might really reveal itself to be after a few listens. But I’m just guessing here. What it certainly does have is a bunch of great, brutal riffs. And it’s damn cool. There, random stream of thoughts out of the way. I guess it’s as good a way to introduce 2010 as any…

* I think it was he who reviewed that one, though I might very well be mistaken.
** And I think they’re due another album sometime soon, now their surfeit of remix EPs has concluded.

Tom Waits – Glitter and Doom Live

I had hoped to have my traditional year-end post up by now, but I have been more long-winded than usual, and will have to up it in the next day or so. Apols! In the meantime, here’s some Tom Waits for y’all. See you in the one-oh!

ANTI- (2009)

(FACT)

If I didn’t know better, I’d sense that something was winding down a tad. Glitter and Doom, as the title implies, is a live album, three years after triple-disc closet-cleaning collection, Orphans. He has released two albums of all-new music in the last decade. Rather than suggesting any kind of mercenary, contractual-obligation fulfilling, behaviour, this seems more to be putting a career’s affairs in order. Tom Waits isn’t getting any younger. So it stands to reason that he’d want to cross the ‘T’s and dot the ‘I’s of a career that justifies such careful housekeeping. A ghoulish thought, admittedly, but a logical one nonetheless.

As Waits grows older – estimates suggest he is now over ten thousand years of age – he sounds more and more like an incredibly charismatic death metal vocalist. Take ‘Get Behind the Mule’, introduced as a song ‘about the very first vehicle’: the music sounds rather like the bins in Tin Pan Alley receiving a kicking, and Waits expels demonic noises like he’s about to join prime Obituary. It’s a fantastic performance, and but one of many dimensions to Waits. What is also clear from this song is Waits’ rare ability, as a white man, to invoke the blues and not have it sound infinitely smug.

Indeed, Waits seems intent on discovering whether it is possible to have too much of a good thing: Glitter and Doom Live is long. Not necessarily longer than a great many records in the CD age, but it involves a level of investment; whether emotion, intellect or just sheer attention; that can fatigue. Whether too long or not, this record is most definitely a good thing. Waits is one of those performers both sufficiently compelling and veteran to be able to omit some real classics and not suffer.

We have plenty of gold to mine. In the first batch of songs, the curmudgeonly, bludgeoning, ‘Singapore’ and the battered, stoical melancholy of ‘Dirt in the Ground’. Later on, the delightful ‘I’ll Shoot the Moon’, a song whose magnificence remains unbesmirched as your reviewer has not heard the Scarlett Johansson cover. Not much in the way of singles” Rod Stewart fans will have to do without ‘Downtown Train’; likewise, The Wire fans and ‘Down in the Hole’. A personal absence is 1983’s utterly masterful ‘In the Neighbourhood’, a song whose lyrical and musical depth would qualify it for American national anthem, in a perfect alternate reality.

In actual reality, we are distracted by the carny likes of Heath Ledger’s Joker starring in an aural Tim Burton film, in ‘Circus’. Or the ennui-drenched warning of ‘Fannin Street’. Having not heard the Alice or Blood Money albums, ‘The Part You Throw Away’ was a pleasant surprise as it lurched out of the speakers like a misunderstood vagabond. And I suppose that’s the beauty of Tom Waits: there is always something of his that you haven’t heard, and it takes a collection such as this to shed some light on those unlit corners of his nocturnal world.

As if to press home the point that loose ends are being tied up, Glitter and Doom contains a bonus disc of Waits’ on-stage banter, anecdotes and digressions. It’s a diverting enough way to spend one’s time, though no more essential than the similar Fugazi mp3 that’s currently doing the rounds, and certainly not on the level of, say, the infamous Buddy Rich tapes. The whole is the point, though. This is a snapshot of a truly one-of-a-kind performer in full swing. It’s hard to imagine anyone really disliking the man; while he’s been doing this for decades, his act never gets old.