No Capitulation

So I got back my couple of films that I took over my time ‘off’ the internet in February. Here’s a selection of the best.

You can view the rest here and here.

Just a little musing on my love of botany.

For ages I was never really sure where I stood with plants. I was interested in them, sure, but not to the exclusion of everything else. That’s still the case now, but now I feel comfortable enough in my chosen area of study that I know that I’d happily study them exclusively and just keep an interest in everything.

I think I began to come to this position when I went on my Plant Identification field trip last summer. That was my first real introduction to actual botany, and then I had the chance to increase and test my knowledge when I went camping not long after. After that, I had a course on plants on uni which absolutely fascinated me, as well as a course on animals. Something about plants just clicked then when we started doing invertebrates, and, whilst invertebrates are certainly fascinating, I could certainly never bring myself to care enough about them more than to know how they evolved, and the same follows for vertebrates. I just can’t find an interest in animal physiology or the way the heart works, where I can find intense interest in the mechanisms of operation of the stomata (seriously, it’s fascinating!).

I guess I’m just a plant man at heart.

This track is intensely sad, yet it rings such a chord of beauty and bitter hope. I can’t think of any way it could be further perfected, save perhaps to enshrine it in an album where it can be completed with other tracks.

I love the Pixies. There’s something so striking about their music that I don’t really hear anywhere else, something that I can’t really describe. There’s their conviction to this loud/quiet dynamic that they pull off so well – they practically invented the concept as it’s applied in modern rock music – there’s Frank Black’s high-pitch half-whine/half-scream thing, one of those voices so utterly not suited for singing yet which he manages to use very compellingly. His lyrics are very surreal, ranging from the rock-pool hilarity of “Palace of the Brine” to themes of incest in “Nimrod’s Son” and “The Holiday Song”, with their later albums taking on very sci-fi themes and topics. They vary between the utterly silly and the fairly serious, but no matter what tone he takes he’s convincing and they don’t feel nonsensical.

Now, the trouble I have with the Pixies is trying to rank their albums in any coherent manner at all. I tend to feel like there does exist some rank of preference in my mind, but I am never able to pin down what it is to any degree at all. Gut instinct tells me that Surfa Rosa (and, by extension, the Come On Pilgrim EP) is their best effort. This is the Pixies at their rawest and most intense, violent and distorted, a collection of perverse delights – prostitution, voyeurism, and blood-stained dresses.

However, whenever I listen to Doolittle, it becomes my favourite album. The lyrics are astounding, they blow me away every time I hear them, and the sound of the album is much more controlled and refined – whilst those violently loud sections make themselves heard in tracks such as “Crackity Jones” or “Gouge Away”, the loud sections of the other tracks are an ultimately more finely-crafted affair. And again, when I listen to Bossanova that one becomes my favourite. The album keeps that more carefully-assembled feel, but throws in a huge handful of weirdness. Wobbling guitar solos, surf tones, and a really fantasmical space feel to everything. It’s a very echoey and open affair, vast and surreal.

The same thing happens for me too with Trompe Le Monde, which takes a more ‘standard’ alt. rock sound, yet still manages to suffuse it with everything that makes the Pixies good. The album adopts an almost completely spacey sci-fi feel, and brings back that more raw feel from Surfa Rosa. It’s lost most of that vastness that made Bossanova great, but tracks like “Planet of Sound” and “The Sad Punk” hold their own greatness.

I guess this means that I must like all of their albums equally. As output of the same group, I feel like they should all be comparable, yet I have a complete inability to do so, and each captivates me equally. It makes making recommendations hard, because I can’t recommend a favourite or their best. The best advice I’d be able to give is not to start with Bossanova, since it’s their least accessible album in my opinion, but aside from that you can make an inroad from anywhere. I’d almost be tempted to recommend someone just go by chronological order, just to get a feel for the way their sound evolves. Ultimately, I guess my indecision goes to show just how much I love this band.

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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