No Capitulation

This is quite possibly my most favouritest of Montreal album. Moving away from the fraught and hectic Hissing Fauna, their sound takes on a hugely funky quality, yet it’s twisted the style into something new. Funk is interspersed with noisy rock, very psychy pop, abstract and repetitive sections, and a multitude of other styles. The most striking aspect of this album is that each track isn’t so much a track as a multitude of different ‘tracklets’ or fragments that are spliced together. There’s some level of coherency between each, with rough thematic elements staying the same on a track, but it’s definitely jumpy and erratic. Kevin Barnes is at his best lyrically on this album, with lyrics which are deeply confessional and positively dripping with impenetrable, abstract metaphor.

I’m trying to interface
You met me at such a dismal point on the arc
I think I understand what you were saying
About the smiles of the skulls
The spastic face was the last one
Our luck was white
I read it with my head open,
Only slightly cracked
Someone will have to close it when I’m done
Make the most out of the visuals
While walking through the woods
I noticed someone had built a house for nobody in particular

Or, perhaps:

The lion leaped out of his pendant and then
He talked of Valerie and her week of wonders
She loves to do beautiful things

One of the biggest themes on the album is sexuality and sex, which rear their ugly heads with abandon. These are not positive spirits, though, and serve for Barnes to express and expel these thoughts from his mind. On this front, the poppy, funky sound really lends itself, serving an eerie, twisted view where the twisted sexuality expressed is contrasted with an upbeat, erotic tune.

He’s just a slutty little flirt and sister he’s only gonna hurt you (watch yourself)
Ladies I’m screaming out to you from the depths of this phallocentric tyranny
My self-conceptions awaiting your invasion clumsy penetration punishment
(Oh yeah) When the hope of another wet nightmare is all we have to live for

Or:

Lover face, how your ass is pumping
Sweet licentious songs. lover face
You’re a scandal, your body is so wrong, wrong

Bless my lips with your Sunlandic kisses.
While our hands explore each others human vessels
Whoa, you know, like four excited spiders

I want you to be my pleasure puss
I want to know what it’s like to be inside you
I want you to be my pleasure puss
I want to know how it feels
Want to give you that

This is one album I’d recommend in a heartbeat. It’s superficially accessible, but just underneath the surface lies a whole realm of hidden meaning and abstruse metaphor hinting at darkness and shadows in Barnes’s mind much more than is easily apparent.

“Life’s not a bitch! Life is a beautiful woman
Your only call her a bitch because she won’t let you get that pussy
Maybe she didn’t feel y’all shared any similar interests
Or maybe you’re just an asshole who couldn’t sweet talk the princess”

—Aesop Rock, Daylight

This track is fantastic. The sheer violence and depravity in the lyrics are compounded with this schizophrenic melody, dissonant yet melodic, entangling the narrator’s perverse and bloodthirsty intentions with a sense of satisfaction and pleasure.

I’ve been dwelling on this album for about a week now. It’s been in my library for god knows how long, but I finally got round to listening to it properly a little while back. It’s a hefty album, clocking in at 2h45m, so I still haven’t managed to listening to it in one sitting, however listening to it in fragments is still a fair way to get ones head around it.

It’s hip-hip, Jim, but not as we know it

This is hip-hop. This is also ambient soundscapes, spoken word, poetry, alliterative verse, and fantastic storytelling. The main mind behind the project, Chess, has this wonderfully deep voice that lends itself perfectly to the poetics of the album, almost like a story teller on children’s television. The song structures break out of those of traditional hip-hop – one is structured as a dialogue between two people, with spoken interludes between verses (Avarice), or what verges on epic poetry telling the story of a warrior out to protect a hidden map from the tyrannical government (The Map).

Some of the imagery evoked is sheer brilliance. “Our fallen sediments are elements of all / In elegance and intelligence / An eminence of eloquent emergence of accord / From a crawl to an animal capable of a call”, or how about “It began when the crest of recession was lessoned upon the modern west / Torn from the caress of the monetary breast / The last breath of investors and vested interest / Bore a dark child of persistent incest / And so our industry froze / The black dog of unemployment rose and rose / Until the coasts were closed / The repossession of homes, depression unbeknown braced / They used terrorism as bait to embrace the database”.

This album takes hip-hop and pushes at the boundaries, transcends them, ignores them. I’d say it’s one of the most important hip-hop albums ever recorded – it shows the levels that the genre can rise to, how it can become a genre of true artistic merit and how it can spark intelligent discussion about a great variety of issues. I think I’d have no trouble labelling this album as a masterpiece, and a requirement in anyone’s library.

Samples after the jump.

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I’ve been meaning to talk about this album for a good few months. I’ve finally found a place to put down my musings with this blog (I have made too many blogs in the past), so here goes!

Thinking about this album, it’s really easy to reflect on the one thing that makes this album brilliant for me – the percussion. It’s the main driving force in this album, forcing the rest of the instrumentation to conform, defining the tempo, informing of the timbre of each track. The beats are steady, strict, and almost mechanical, robotic, in their form, and rigid, slicing through the tracks sharply. The time signatures they use are fantastically complex, and it’s very easy to get lost following them as they proceed.

Of course, a post-rock album that focuses solely on the percussion is not an album that fulfils its potential, and the melodies here are great, too. There’s a sort of dnb/dancey thing going on, and fused with a post-rock sound it really brings out the potential of those genres. Fuzzy synthy basslines, souped-up guitar midlines and some little electric trimmings on top.

Pick this one up if you haven’t got it already, because this album really fulfils its promise right from the get-go and doesn’t stop until the end.

Read more for a couple of tracks.

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