2K7 In Review: My Favorite Albums, #1
Egad, it's over. I'm not referring to my recent vehicle drama (car reported stolen on Sunday, recovered on Friday), but to both this list of last year's audio highlights and this humble condo's welcoming of three new female residents. Both conclusions signal a new realm of possibilities, on the blog and at home. Of course, a few obvious things must be done, such as decorating the "suicidally bare" walls or detailing this summer's terrible old film selection (hint: it has something in common with some satiric fan fiction I presented in April), but overall I am thrilled that the main task is behind us and that the future can unfold at its leisure.
For this very post, I have saved a conversation with one of my favorite band's founders and main creative forces. My September phoner with Katatonia guitarist Anders Nyström is the 2007 interview of which I am most proud, although I should say up front that it's the most fanboyish of these things that I have conducted in a long time. I'm cool with that. As far as I'm concerned, nobody does it better right now, and it was my honor to tell him so. Check it out if you like.
Also, before I get to my favorite album of '07, I want to belatedly acknowledge Entartete Kunst's anniversary, which coincidentally shares a date with my parents'. Since my first entry more than three years ago, dozens of eyeballs have scanned this blog for my opinions on unpopular culture and life as I know it. I know it's been a bumpy ride marked by periods of inactivity, but I want to thank everyone who's left a comment, considered my recommendations or merely stopped by in the past year. This blog was, is and always will be a place for me to unwind and unload, but that anyone else bothers to absorb it makes all the difference. My mission continues to be thoughtful transgression, best described by a quote attributed to André Peret: "Now, more than ever, it is evident that 'good taste' only refers to that which reinforces the status quo."
1. Bloc Party, A Weekend in the City (Vice)
Two terms of Republican White House deficit expansion, the unfortunate return of fluorescent colors to young people's wardrobes, an uninterred Rambo crinkling his swollen features in disgust at Strawberry Shortcake's post-Britney hoochie makeover... there is no denying that we are still stuck in serious 1980s mode. This bothers me somewhat. My first era of genuine cognizance coincided with the Greed Decade, and having grown up past it, I tend to view the '80s as a garish, Reagan-stained neon nightmare of hard edges, poofy hairdos, nuclear waste, satanic panic, crooked televangelists, fractured marriages and disposable status symbols. As a kid, I had no perspective and naturally bought into much of the plastic junk they waved at me, including the popular music of the time. I haven't listened to the radio for new musical entertainment since I discovered new music that wasn't played on the radio, which was around the time that the Top 40 format fractured into segregated genres and MTV started replacing music videos with Christ knows what. Yet, although I eventually grew impatient with the stupid shit being pushed on the cusp of the '90s, I must admit that thanks to radio slavery, for most of the decade I had a reasonable introduction to various types of music. Top 40 radio wasn't just a procession of slick, cheesy R&B/hip-hop crossovers back then, but a place where you could hear a slate of performers as diverse as Duran Duran, John Fogerty, The Fat Boys, Patti LaBelle, Linda Rondstadt, Twisted Sister, Al Jarreau and The Fabulous Thunderbirds within any given hour. With that kind of variety early on, it's no wonder that I can't listen to the same type of music all the time, or that I prefer music with as many facets as fits the mood. As much as I will typically protest, I suppose I do have an ingrained attachment to certain aspects of '80s music. Oddly, the band that brought me to that shocking realization did not release a recording until 2003, and that band is Bloc Party.
On paper, Bloc Party's second LP, A Weekend in the City, is as '80s as it gets. Post-punk, new wave, shoegaze and early alternative rock styles still factor into the English quartet's arsenal, a combination that provided suprising heart and firepower to 2005's Silent Alarm, now a little older and less flabbergasted at the ways of the world. The cynical, cosmopolitan electro-rock feel of some tracks could accompany a Gaultier runway show, while others offer a keening, wistful romanticism fit for a John Hughes montage. There's even a doomed love song to cocaine ("On"), which I didn't get until after about a dozen listens. Yet Bloc Party's glorious distillation of the gloomy, pretty, defiant spirit of non-mainstream Thatcher-era UK music merely employs popular sigils to set an unmistakably modern scene.
Kele Okereke breathes the album's dramatic opening lines ("I am trying to be heroic/In an age of modernity") like a poet born in a war zone, then spends the rest of the explosive "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)" detailing a deadened life of joyless consumption and calculated distance, sickened at his own compliance ("How we longed for corruption in these golden years"). The tension mounts as broadcast snippets morph into Morse code guitar bleeps, Matt Tong's drums clattering the club-friendly beat that drives disco-punk barnburner "Hunting for Witches." Gordon Moakes' bass thrums and throbs sternly on this standout single, Russell Lissack channeling Randy Rhoades with a conspicuously "Crazy Train"-ish guitar riff that remains economically British. The band creates an appropriately apocalyptic bedrock for Okereke's vocals, which remain eerily soft and blissful while relating post-9/11 conservative paranoia, a portrait of fear and ignorance spurred by mass media made spookier by its thrilling hooks. Finally, the white knuckles loosen as "Waiting for the 7.18" introduces a wintry morning stillness, Okereke's falsetto brushing against gentle chimes and guitar swells. It sounds so peaceful, even as the lyrics drip with the same urban ennui and loathing that came before, until it bursts open with deafening abandon, Lissack's shoegazer guitar blazing with light and color. Kele begs his companion "Let's drive to Brighton on the weekend," inverting the album title by suggesting they get the fuck away from the suffocating concrete and noise and congestion. By invoking the popular seaside tourist town, he suggests a nostalgic indulgence of an illusory utopia, yet sadly acknowledges the artifice of such a conceit ("Can I still kick a ball a hundred yards?/Now we cling to bottles and memories of the past"). With this attitude in mind, Weekend cannot honestly be deemed an '80s throwback.
The electronically-enhanced lead single "The Prayer" follows, stomping into a posh club with overdriven swagger as Okereke recites the silent mantra of a soul yearning for adoration in an anonymous environment, his chorus ("Tonight make me unstoppable/And I will charm, I will slice, I will dazzle them with my wit") heartbreakingly delusional and painfully recognizable. The ebb and flow of "Uniform" takes a torch to fashion victims, bitterly addressing the conformity of nonconformity ("We tell ourselves we're different/I've gotten so good at lying to myself") while a robotic voice plays Greek chorus, repeating "You can be happy, just play dumb." The protagonist of the aforementioned "On" may as well be the jittery club kid from "The Prayer" having found his apparent savior at the other end of a rolled-up twenty ("You make my tongue loose/I am hopeful and stutter-free," "I can charm them all"). The music turns melty, Tong's slippery rhythm an irregular heartbeat as our tragic hero discovers "a flatness bleaker than the one it replaced." Lissack's guitar conjures a desolate Western wasteland during the sweepingly sad chorus of "Where Is Home?" Some disappointed listeners found this album too apolitical after Bloc Party's debut; I disagree, but admit that even this electro-touched powderkeg, the disc's most overt "message" song, has a personal touch. Okereke's parents emigrated to England from Nigeria, and the song expresses the grief and frustration left in the immigrant community in the aftermath of xenophobic violence. If you cannot be moved after a line like "In every headline we are reminded/That this is not home for us," then congratulations. You have achieved the sort of aloof numbness Bloc Party instinctually rages against. Just stick with your T-Pain mp3s and don't bother listening to Weekend.
The languidly beautiful "Kreuzberg" concerns a fumbled interpersonal connection, using the city of Berlin as a metaphor ("There is a wall that runs right through me/Just like this city I will never be joined") for a sensitive heart after a too-brief love affair. Again the past rears its bittersweet head on the Cure-riffic single "I Still Remember," Okereke putting on his best Robert Smith while lamenting an innocent childhood love that could have, should have been more, the fact that he's singing about another boy making the unrealized desire even more poignant. This makes the driving "Sunday" the most optimistic track on offer, its naked sentiment ("I love you in the morning/When you're still hung over") infused with working class warmth. Kele returns to Weekend's opening theme on closing number "SXRT," observing with Morrissey-style bluntness, "Being a man made me coarse/When I wanted to be delicate." The track's title refers to Seroxat (aka Paxil), a pharmaceutical antidepressant believed to cause suicidal thoughts, which are presumably what are afflicting the song's protagonist. Despite building to a heavenly post-rock crescendo, the lullaby-like track is the final transmission of someone who, try as he might, cannot relieve the pain that comes with having a heart in this cruel milieu: "If you want to know what makes me sad/Well it's hope, the endurance of faith/A battle that lasts a lifetime/A fight that never ends." This seems like as good a place as any to note that another entire album's worth of b-sides and bonus tracks came out of the same recording sessions. Unofficially dubbed Another Weekend in the City by fans, tunes such as the menacing "Secrets" (from the version of the album found exclusively in Canada and Target stores) are frequently as gripping as the album's proper tracks. And, before the year was out, they also released a dancey new single entitled "Flux," in which Kele is smooshed through ubiquitous Auto-Tune pitch alteration to further cement it in the now.
A Weekend in the City tanked with many hipster critics, and my theory is that it cut those chin-stroking nosepickers too close to the bone. It is not a carefree, windows-down pop record, although it is plenty catchy, the material is mostly upbeat and while sonically adventurous, never approaches experimental tedium. It is also not hellbent on sociopolitical browbeating, despite brimming with righteous indignation fueled by contemporary unease and interpersonal division. Bloc Party doesn't simply demonize George W. Bush, which is the only response most politically-charged musicians today seem to be able to muster - quite an impotent gesture when you consider that the asshole's somehow still stinking up his elevated office. The album is prone to mopey fits of self-pity, and its occasionally naïve emotional frankness might somehow relegate it to the "emo" bin. Yet, this is inextricably linked with recognizable, real-life trigger points. More factors are crushing the boys' brittle optimism than mere romance. Indifference and ambition beget soulless conformity. Massive monuments to commercial dependency obscure the untamed wilderness. There is simply nowhere to hide under the oddly soothing yet hideously artificial greenish-yellow glow bathing the elevator-bound quartet in the booklet photos and the headlight-streaked freeway on the cover (likely the one on which "people are afraid to merge"). A Weekend in the City turns the anti-human culture bestowed by the 1980s on itself, and in doing so both evokes and repudiates what it meant to be a human in 2007.
Three videos were made for Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City... see below.
"The Prayer"
"I Still Remember"
"Hunting for Witches"
15 RUNNERS-UP (in alphabetical order):
Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Definitive Jux)
The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ire Works (Relapse)
Gamma Ray, Land of the Free II (SPV)
Helloween, Gambling With the Devil (SPV)
High on Fire, Death is This Communion (Relapse)
HORSE the band, A Natural Death (Koch)
Immolation, Shadows in the Light (Century Media)
Parts & Labor, Mapmaker (Jagjaguwar)
Rotting Christ, Theogonia (Season of Mist)
Skinny Puppy, Mythmaker (Synthetic Symphony)
They Might Be Giants, The Else (Idlewild/Zoë)
Thurisaz, Circadian Rhythm (Shiver)
Tomahawk, Anonymous (Ipecac)
The Tossers, Agony (Victory)
Ween, La Cucaracha (Rounder)
ENTARTETE KUNST'S PREVIOUS '07 MUSIC ROUNDUPS:
Spring special
Year-end music, part 1.html
Year-end music, part 2.html
Year-end music, part 3.html
OTHER ENJOYABLE RECORDS THAT CAME OUT IN '07, BUT WEREN'T FEATURED IN ANY OF ENTARTETE KUNST'S ROUNDUPS:
3, The End Is Begun (Metal Blade)
Aabsinthe, In Search of Light (Rupture)
Aereogramme, My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go (Sonic Unyon)
All Smiles, Ten Readings of a Warning (Dangerbird)
Anaal Nathrakh, Hell Is Empty, and All the Devils Are Here (FETO)
Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Domino)
Antimatter, Leaving Eden (Prophecy)
Avichi, The Divine Tragedy (Numen Malevolum Barathri)
Björk, Volta (Atlantic)
Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum (Graveface)
Blonde Redhead, 23 (4AD)
Captain Yonder, Good-bye, Woland! (Strange Midge)
Constant Velocity, Constant Velocity (self-released)
Dawnbringer, In Sickness and In Dreams (Battle Kommand)
Deerhunter, Cryptograms (Kranky)
Dethklok, The Dethalbum (Williams Street)
Ghost Brigade, Guided By Fire (Candlelight)
Lesbian, Power Hör (Holy Mountain)
Manes, How the World Came to an End (Candlelight)
Ministry, The Last Sucker (13th Planet)
Steve Moore, The Henge (Relapse)
Andy Palacio (RIP) & The Garifuna Collective, Wátina (Cumbancha)
Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)
Powerglove, Metal Kombat for the Mortal Man (self-released)
The Red Chord, Prey for Eyes (Metal Blade)
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, In Glorious Times (The End)
Sonata Arctica, Unia (Nuclear Blast)
Spectral, Stormriders (CCP)
Svartsot, Ravnenes Saga (Napalm)
Type O Negative, Dead Again (SPV)
Ulver, Shadows of the Sun (Jester)
Volbeat, Rock the Rebel/Metal the Devil (Mascot)
Wyrd, Kammen (Avantgarde)
Yakuza, Transmutations (Prosthetic)
Year of Desolation, Year of Desolation (Prosthetic)
Yeasayer, All Hour Cymbals (We Are Free)
For this very post, I have saved a conversation with one of my favorite band's founders and main creative forces. My September phoner with Katatonia guitarist Anders Nyström is the 2007 interview of which I am most proud, although I should say up front that it's the most fanboyish of these things that I have conducted in a long time. I'm cool with that. As far as I'm concerned, nobody does it better right now, and it was my honor to tell him so. Check it out if you like.
Also, before I get to my favorite album of '07, I want to belatedly acknowledge Entartete Kunst's anniversary, which coincidentally shares a date with my parents'. Since my first entry more than three years ago, dozens of eyeballs have scanned this blog for my opinions on unpopular culture and life as I know it. I know it's been a bumpy ride marked by periods of inactivity, but I want to thank everyone who's left a comment, considered my recommendations or merely stopped by in the past year. This blog was, is and always will be a place for me to unwind and unload, but that anyone else bothers to absorb it makes all the difference. My mission continues to be thoughtful transgression, best described by a quote attributed to André Peret: "Now, more than ever, it is evident that 'good taste' only refers to that which reinforces the status quo."
1. Bloc Party, A Weekend in the City (Vice)Two terms of Republican White House deficit expansion, the unfortunate return of fluorescent colors to young people's wardrobes, an uninterred Rambo crinkling his swollen features in disgust at Strawberry Shortcake's post-Britney hoochie makeover... there is no denying that we are still stuck in serious 1980s mode. This bothers me somewhat. My first era of genuine cognizance coincided with the Greed Decade, and having grown up past it, I tend to view the '80s as a garish, Reagan-stained neon nightmare of hard edges, poofy hairdos, nuclear waste, satanic panic, crooked televangelists, fractured marriages and disposable status symbols. As a kid, I had no perspective and naturally bought into much of the plastic junk they waved at me, including the popular music of the time. I haven't listened to the radio for new musical entertainment since I discovered new music that wasn't played on the radio, which was around the time that the Top 40 format fractured into segregated genres and MTV started replacing music videos with Christ knows what. Yet, although I eventually grew impatient with the stupid shit being pushed on the cusp of the '90s, I must admit that thanks to radio slavery, for most of the decade I had a reasonable introduction to various types of music. Top 40 radio wasn't just a procession of slick, cheesy R&B/hip-hop crossovers back then, but a place where you could hear a slate of performers as diverse as Duran Duran, John Fogerty, The Fat Boys, Patti LaBelle, Linda Rondstadt, Twisted Sister, Al Jarreau and The Fabulous Thunderbirds within any given hour. With that kind of variety early on, it's no wonder that I can't listen to the same type of music all the time, or that I prefer music with as many facets as fits the mood. As much as I will typically protest, I suppose I do have an ingrained attachment to certain aspects of '80s music. Oddly, the band that brought me to that shocking realization did not release a recording until 2003, and that band is Bloc Party.
On paper, Bloc Party's second LP, A Weekend in the City, is as '80s as it gets. Post-punk, new wave, shoegaze and early alternative rock styles still factor into the English quartet's arsenal, a combination that provided suprising heart and firepower to 2005's Silent Alarm, now a little older and less flabbergasted at the ways of the world. The cynical, cosmopolitan electro-rock feel of some tracks could accompany a Gaultier runway show, while others offer a keening, wistful romanticism fit for a John Hughes montage. There's even a doomed love song to cocaine ("On"), which I didn't get until after about a dozen listens. Yet Bloc Party's glorious distillation of the gloomy, pretty, defiant spirit of non-mainstream Thatcher-era UK music merely employs popular sigils to set an unmistakably modern scene.
Kele Okereke breathes the album's dramatic opening lines ("I am trying to be heroic/In an age of modernity") like a poet born in a war zone, then spends the rest of the explosive "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)" detailing a deadened life of joyless consumption and calculated distance, sickened at his own compliance ("How we longed for corruption in these golden years"). The tension mounts as broadcast snippets morph into Morse code guitar bleeps, Matt Tong's drums clattering the club-friendly beat that drives disco-punk barnburner "Hunting for Witches." Gordon Moakes' bass thrums and throbs sternly on this standout single, Russell Lissack channeling Randy Rhoades with a conspicuously "Crazy Train"-ish guitar riff that remains economically British. The band creates an appropriately apocalyptic bedrock for Okereke's vocals, which remain eerily soft and blissful while relating post-9/11 conservative paranoia, a portrait of fear and ignorance spurred by mass media made spookier by its thrilling hooks. Finally, the white knuckles loosen as "Waiting for the 7.18" introduces a wintry morning stillness, Okereke's falsetto brushing against gentle chimes and guitar swells. It sounds so peaceful, even as the lyrics drip with the same urban ennui and loathing that came before, until it bursts open with deafening abandon, Lissack's shoegazer guitar blazing with light and color. Kele begs his companion "Let's drive to Brighton on the weekend," inverting the album title by suggesting they get the fuck away from the suffocating concrete and noise and congestion. By invoking the popular seaside tourist town, he suggests a nostalgic indulgence of an illusory utopia, yet sadly acknowledges the artifice of such a conceit ("Can I still kick a ball a hundred yards?/Now we cling to bottles and memories of the past"). With this attitude in mind, Weekend cannot honestly be deemed an '80s throwback.
The electronically-enhanced lead single "The Prayer" follows, stomping into a posh club with overdriven swagger as Okereke recites the silent mantra of a soul yearning for adoration in an anonymous environment, his chorus ("Tonight make me unstoppable/And I will charm, I will slice, I will dazzle them with my wit") heartbreakingly delusional and painfully recognizable. The ebb and flow of "Uniform" takes a torch to fashion victims, bitterly addressing the conformity of nonconformity ("We tell ourselves we're different/I've gotten so good at lying to myself") while a robotic voice plays Greek chorus, repeating "You can be happy, just play dumb." The protagonist of the aforementioned "On" may as well be the jittery club kid from "The Prayer" having found his apparent savior at the other end of a rolled-up twenty ("You make my tongue loose/I am hopeful and stutter-free," "I can charm them all"). The music turns melty, Tong's slippery rhythm an irregular heartbeat as our tragic hero discovers "a flatness bleaker than the one it replaced." Lissack's guitar conjures a desolate Western wasteland during the sweepingly sad chorus of "Where Is Home?" Some disappointed listeners found this album too apolitical after Bloc Party's debut; I disagree, but admit that even this electro-touched powderkeg, the disc's most overt "message" song, has a personal touch. Okereke's parents emigrated to England from Nigeria, and the song expresses the grief and frustration left in the immigrant community in the aftermath of xenophobic violence. If you cannot be moved after a line like "In every headline we are reminded/That this is not home for us," then congratulations. You have achieved the sort of aloof numbness Bloc Party instinctually rages against. Just stick with your T-Pain mp3s and don't bother listening to Weekend.
The languidly beautiful "Kreuzberg" concerns a fumbled interpersonal connection, using the city of Berlin as a metaphor ("There is a wall that runs right through me/Just like this city I will never be joined") for a sensitive heart after a too-brief love affair. Again the past rears its bittersweet head on the Cure-riffic single "I Still Remember," Okereke putting on his best Robert Smith while lamenting an innocent childhood love that could have, should have been more, the fact that he's singing about another boy making the unrealized desire even more poignant. This makes the driving "Sunday" the most optimistic track on offer, its naked sentiment ("I love you in the morning/When you're still hung over") infused with working class warmth. Kele returns to Weekend's opening theme on closing number "SXRT," observing with Morrissey-style bluntness, "Being a man made me coarse/When I wanted to be delicate." The track's title refers to Seroxat (aka Paxil), a pharmaceutical antidepressant believed to cause suicidal thoughts, which are presumably what are afflicting the song's protagonist. Despite building to a heavenly post-rock crescendo, the lullaby-like track is the final transmission of someone who, try as he might, cannot relieve the pain that comes with having a heart in this cruel milieu: "If you want to know what makes me sad/Well it's hope, the endurance of faith/A battle that lasts a lifetime/A fight that never ends." This seems like as good a place as any to note that another entire album's worth of b-sides and bonus tracks came out of the same recording sessions. Unofficially dubbed Another Weekend in the City by fans, tunes such as the menacing "Secrets" (from the version of the album found exclusively in Canada and Target stores) are frequently as gripping as the album's proper tracks. And, before the year was out, they also released a dancey new single entitled "Flux," in which Kele is smooshed through ubiquitous Auto-Tune pitch alteration to further cement it in the now.
A Weekend in the City tanked with many hipster critics, and my theory is that it cut those chin-stroking nosepickers too close to the bone. It is not a carefree, windows-down pop record, although it is plenty catchy, the material is mostly upbeat and while sonically adventurous, never approaches experimental tedium. It is also not hellbent on sociopolitical browbeating, despite brimming with righteous indignation fueled by contemporary unease and interpersonal division. Bloc Party doesn't simply demonize George W. Bush, which is the only response most politically-charged musicians today seem to be able to muster - quite an impotent gesture when you consider that the asshole's somehow still stinking up his elevated office. The album is prone to mopey fits of self-pity, and its occasionally naïve emotional frankness might somehow relegate it to the "emo" bin. Yet, this is inextricably linked with recognizable, real-life trigger points. More factors are crushing the boys' brittle optimism than mere romance. Indifference and ambition beget soulless conformity. Massive monuments to commercial dependency obscure the untamed wilderness. There is simply nowhere to hide under the oddly soothing yet hideously artificial greenish-yellow glow bathing the elevator-bound quartet in the booklet photos and the headlight-streaked freeway on the cover (likely the one on which "people are afraid to merge"). A Weekend in the City turns the anti-human culture bestowed by the 1980s on itself, and in doing so both evokes and repudiates what it meant to be a human in 2007.
Three videos were made for Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City... see below.
"The Prayer"
"I Still Remember"
"Hunting for Witches"
15 RUNNERS-UP (in alphabetical order):
Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Definitive Jux)
The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ire Works (Relapse)
Gamma Ray, Land of the Free II (SPV)
Helloween, Gambling With the Devil (SPV)
High on Fire, Death is This Communion (Relapse)
HORSE the band, A Natural Death (Koch)
Immolation, Shadows in the Light (Century Media)
Parts & Labor, Mapmaker (Jagjaguwar)
Rotting Christ, Theogonia (Season of Mist)
Skinny Puppy, Mythmaker (Synthetic Symphony)
They Might Be Giants, The Else (Idlewild/Zoë)
Thurisaz, Circadian Rhythm (Shiver)
Tomahawk, Anonymous (Ipecac)
The Tossers, Agony (Victory)
Ween, La Cucaracha (Rounder)
ENTARTETE KUNST'S PREVIOUS '07 MUSIC ROUNDUPS:
Spring special
Year-end music, part 1.html
Year-end music, part 2.html
Year-end music, part 3.html
OTHER ENJOYABLE RECORDS THAT CAME OUT IN '07, BUT WEREN'T FEATURED IN ANY OF ENTARTETE KUNST'S ROUNDUPS:
3, The End Is Begun (Metal Blade)
Aabsinthe, In Search of Light (Rupture)
Aereogramme, My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go (Sonic Unyon)
All Smiles, Ten Readings of a Warning (Dangerbird)
Anaal Nathrakh, Hell Is Empty, and All the Devils Are Here (FETO)
Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Domino)
Antimatter, Leaving Eden (Prophecy)
Avichi, The Divine Tragedy (Numen Malevolum Barathri)
Björk, Volta (Atlantic)
Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum (Graveface)
Blonde Redhead, 23 (4AD)
Captain Yonder, Good-bye, Woland! (Strange Midge)
Constant Velocity, Constant Velocity (self-released)
Dawnbringer, In Sickness and In Dreams (Battle Kommand)
Deerhunter, Cryptograms (Kranky)
Dethklok, The Dethalbum (Williams Street)
Ghost Brigade, Guided By Fire (Candlelight)
Lesbian, Power Hör (Holy Mountain)
Manes, How the World Came to an End (Candlelight)
Ministry, The Last Sucker (13th Planet)
Steve Moore, The Henge (Relapse)
Andy Palacio (RIP) & The Garifuna Collective, Wátina (Cumbancha)
Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)
Powerglove, Metal Kombat for the Mortal Man (self-released)
The Red Chord, Prey for Eyes (Metal Blade)
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, In Glorious Times (The End)
Sonata Arctica, Unia (Nuclear Blast)
Spectral, Stormriders (CCP)
Svartsot, Ravnenes Saga (Napalm)
Type O Negative, Dead Again (SPV)
Ulver, Shadows of the Sun (Jester)
Volbeat, Rock the Rebel/Metal the Devil (Mascot)
Wyrd, Kammen (Avantgarde)
Yakuza, Transmutations (Prosthetic)
Year of Desolation, Year of Desolation (Prosthetic)
Yeasayer, All Hour Cymbals (We Are Free)
posted by SoulReaper at 11:59 PM
1 Comments:
Leaders, Not Followers: The Cold Ways of Katatonia
The band formed in 1991. They have produced seven LPs, a plethora of EPs and singles, a couple of live DVDs and even a box set. Their records frequently turn up on year-end best lists, and their influence runs deep, as shown in a two-disc tribute album released in early 2007.
Katatonia, nonetheless, remains the most underrated metal band on the planet.
For the Swedish quintet, genre affiliation probably adds to their frustrating anonymity, as their appeal lies beyond scene boundaries.
Katatonia began as a doom/death outfit, Anders Nyström's painfully melodic guitar lines crawling spiderlike beneath drummer Jonas Renkse's tortured screams. Doom cultists revere their 1993 debut, Dance of December Souls, as one of the purest expressions of sonic misery ever committed to tape.
Over time, the band's music edged away from its underground aspects. First, Renkse stopped growling because his throat couldn't handle the stress. They enlisted Mikael Åkerfeldt of longtime friends Opeth for two EPs and 1996's Brave Murder Day album, boasting a more uptempo but still desolate sound as well as a second guitarist in Fredrik Norrman.
By 1998's Discouraged Ones, Renkse resumed singing, this time in a mournful croon reminiscent of The Cure's Robert Smith. Combined with Nyström's and Norrman's hypnotic harmonies, the approach was less harsh but retained their signature dejected tone. The next year's Tonight's Decision expanded the template to include denser arrangements and evocatively vague lyrics informed more by indie rock than death metal convention.
Yet it was 2001's Last Fair Deal Gone Down, which saw the addition of drummer Daniel Liljekvist and Norrman's younger brother Mattias on bass, where Katatonia truly became worthy of fame beyond the metal subculture. The rhythm section's prowess allowed for more dynamic songwriting, with some sections hitting harder than ever and the ethereal moments awash in tides of shoegazer melancholy.
2003's Viva Emptiness and 2006's The Great Cold Distance continued to refine this approach, both flawless collections of compact yet progressive songs that could appeal to darker souls who enjoy everything from Paradise Lost and Tool to Smashing Pumpkins and Interpol. All the while, Katatonia has maintained a cerebral "less is more" credo, setting them apart from the flashy overkill that reduces much of heavy metal to a campy cliché. Seriously, what other metal act could get away with covering tragic troubadour Jeff Buckley or indie folkie Will Oldham?
Several days into the band's first American headlining tour, Anders Nyström called to discuss Katatonia's 2007 release, a live CD/DVD entitled Live Consternation (Peaceville), as well as what sets his band apart from the "gothic metal" acts with which it is often grouped, plus an update on Bloodbath, his death metal side project with Renkse. An edited version of that conversation follows.
A: Hello, man!
Q: Hello! How are you doing?
A: I'm doing fine. We just arrived in Poughkeepsie and are about to start a new day. How are you? Cool?
Q: Great. I'm really glad we could set this up. I tried to do a chat with you last year, but it didn't happen. How is the tour going?
A: Ah, it's been picking up. We've only played three shows so far. New York was awesome, and it's picked up from there. It was a little bit rough in the beginning, both on our part and also turnout-wise with the audience, playing small venues and stuff. But now we're getting everything together, the wheels are rolling.
Q: You guys were due for an American tour forever. Why did it take so long? I know there are plenty of people in America who are Katatonia fans, I see people wearing your shirts at shows, you know. But until you opened on the Moonspell tour last fall, you'd only played a couple of festivals.
A: It all comes down to support, or actually, not having the support from the label. In fact, none of our releases from our back catalog has been released properly in America because [Peaceville] never had an office over here releasing them domestically, and they didn't have even, you know, putting them out on license or anything. Our label, unfortunately, just wasn't that interested in the American market and totally neglected it. That made us suffer because we didn't get any financial support or any promotion at all to get over here and tour for the albums.
So we've been focusing on Europe all these years only and we were getting sick and tired of it because, I mean, it's our band and it's our career and we have so many fans we want to meet and hang out with and play for. We basically said, "If we don't do it now, we're probably never going to do it." So, we just jumped on the first chance and did it independently from the label, we didn't use any support from them or anything. We paid everything from our own pockets and jumped on that last tour with Moonspell last year.
We figured out that since we got the visas going for a year, we were good for another return. We thought maybe it's too soon to get over here and especially do a headline thing, especially since we haven't been working ourselves up from the ground, really. But we said, "We'll just do it and see how it goes," because it's worth risking this chance, definitely, and so far things have been going pretty good. We'll see how it goes at the end of the tour, but we're so glad to be back again! The people that missed us last time have a new chance, and it's even within the same year.
Q: You probably get to play a little longer, too, since you're headlining.
A: Definitely. That was the biggest shitty thing on the last tour. We have so many songs to play, you hear all these people scream out their song selections, and it's like, "Damn! I want to play that song for you, but we don't have the time." This time, we have, like, an hour and twenty minutes to play, so we have about a seventeen song set list every night, spanning ten years back, so we're probably pleasing most of our audience this time.
Q: Katatonia seems to have a fan base that is very, very devoted, and there are many of us who like your old stuff and your new stuff, so whatever you're going to play is probably going to be fine.
A: Yeah, I really, really notice that our fan base over here is really devoted, and that's what makes us feel so comfortable being back here, even on a headlining tour so early. It's a very tight thing with our fans. It's something that's been I guess building up all these years that we haven't been around here, also, so it's just amazing to go out and meet our fans over here that we have been neglecting for so long.
Q: I thought The Great Cold Distance was the best album from last year, and from the Internet it seems a lot of other people, loved it, too.
A: Wow, thank you!
Q: It's actually been a trend for a while. For me, very time you guys put out a record it ends up my favorite for the year.
A: (laughs) Wow!
Q: I think that there's something in Katatonia's music that really creates a deep connection with people. It's more than just the music and the lyrics.
A: Yeah, I think it's definitely the whole personal thing we build up with that. The music and the lyrics go very deep, and I think it's very easy for people who are probably like we are to relate to what we do. I shouldn't say we're a big, happy family, we're probably a big, unhappy family (laughs), but this is the thing that we create, this really strong bond with our fans because when I look at some faces when I play, I just seem them like… they're not even looking at us, they're closing their eyes and singing the lyrics and stuff.
For me, that's an amazing feeling. I really see that they take it seriously and they really drift off with what we do. That's amazing to see because we're not that average, typical, go and mosh around at the concert and have fun and then go home band. I think it goes a little bit deeper than that. It takes you away for a while, I guess, you can just forget about some of the troubles you have in everyday life. This is what we write about, and this is how we connect with our audience.
Q: There's a lot of emotion going into the music, and at least these days it doesn't seem entirely negative.
A: No, it's not. This is very important. People think Katatonia are a miserable bunch of bastards or are only into the negative aspects of life. That's not the deal. We sing about that because that's what's happening, but it's not like we strive for. We don't strive to be miserable, we strive to get away from it, but we're telling about the process of dealing with it.
Q: Especially on the last couple of records, the lyrics seem to be moving away from self-deprecation and more to factors outside of the person, more paranoia than depression. I know you don't write the lyrics, but you handle the music, which I think mirrors the tension of the words.
A: Sure, and when we write a song, we always think about the charisma of a song, what it needs, and we want to have a vibe. As soon as we start writing the song, we always double up the whole concept of the lyrics and the vibes for that as well, so everything has to go in hand. It's pretty interesting this way because Jonas is the main lyric writer, of course, but we often talk in pictures, even when we write music and the lyrics. The whole identity of the song is there from the beginning, so we know what the song is going to be about. Even though he puts in the words after the music is done, we already know what kind of song it's going to be. So it all comes together from the first day we do it together.
Q: For a while, it seemed as if Katatonia was growing less "metal." You still had the trancelike, repetitive riffs going, but the music's aggressiveness overall had kind of leveled off. Around the time Daniel and Mattias came in, Katatonia's sound expanded in all areas. It's punchier, the rhythms are trickier and there are greater dynamics.
A: Definitely. That's probably because we're becoming better musicians and playing with better musicians. Our drummer really has a lot of stuff in him that we're trying to bring out to create dynamics within the music. We still know what the music's going to sound like – dark, atmospheric, trancelike – but we can still evolve in the whole musicianship department and create everything interestingly that way, too. That's really what challenges us right now, to really create some professional, I wouldn't say technical but a little bit progressive musicianship in the songs, but still keep it very dark. I don't hear a lot of bands do exactly that mix right now, so I think it's a good identity and it's a good path for Katatonia to walk further on right now.
Q: You guys are traditionally regarded as sort of a gothic metal band…
A: Oh, yeah. Every day, we hear it every day.
Q: To me, when I think of gothic metal, I think of Moonspell or Type O Negative or something like that. That's so not what you sound like.
A: (laughs) No, thankfully not. I'm not bothered being tagged that by people or being lumped into that bunch, but personally it's really important for me to feel that I am not part of that, because this is really not what we want to do. For me, it's like if I would feel we would be, it would be a failure for me, actually, because we're trying to create something different from that. Some people probably don't really pick up on the small details where we are different from it, but it's such a big scene. As I said, I'm so used to it, "gothic metal," that I'm not bothered by it, but personally it's very important that I don't fall into that.
Q: I can see that definitely. You're one of a number of metal bands doing really interesting and unique things because your influences are wider. You guys are into a lot of indie rock and shoegaze stuff.
A: Yep. I think it's very, very healthy and you keep good artistic integrity by taking your influences from other music styles and incorporating them into your own sound. We want to keep the sound obviously heavy and within metal. I don't see many metal bands taking their main inspirations from outside of metal and it becomes a very narrow-minded scene that way about how things should be. They don't realize that if they would actually make a metallic version of some pop song, they would smash your face apart, it would be such a good song. People have such a problem to just accept good music because it's another style.
You know, I'm really sick of this narrow-minded thing that's going on in the metal scene. If you've got an Iron Maiden riff going and it's happy as hell and really hyper-melodic with a lot of harmonies and blah blah blah, it's totally okay because it's Maiden. But then if you have the same thing going in whatever song, it could be a pop song, a techno song, then it's shit. It could be the Maiden riff playing and they wouldn't even hear it. This is something I always end up arguing with metallers.
Q: See, I'm the kind of person who would hear that and say, "Cool, I like this song because it sounds like Maiden and I love Maiden." But I listen to other types of music, too, and I see what you're saying, most people aren't like that.
A: Yeah. It's healthier and you get a richer audio life for yourself if you're open-minded to good songs regardless of the music style.
Q: Can we talk about the non-metal stuff that comes into play for Katatonia's creative process? What do find yourself listening to?
A: Well, we have our old influences that are really important for the band. Maybe we don't listen to them as much today as we did back in the day, but The Cure was one of the main bands for our sound to draw influence from, and also Fields of the Nephilim. Slowdive was a hugely important shoegazer band for us, they created endless inspiration for Katatonia. Also we listen to singer-songwriter types of bands. Red House Painters has been a big one, Jeff Buckley was a great artist…
Q: Yeah, you covered him.
A: We did, we actually had to do it as a tribute to him. I listen a lot to Tori Amos, I get a lot of inspiration from her. The list goes on. As soon as there's something soulful or dark going on in the music, we're probably listening to it.
Q: Are you working on new material? The last album came out about a year and a half ago.
A: We're about to start a new cycle now. I think this tour will end The Great Cold Distance chapter and we're going back home, we're going to start digging up all the new ideas we have, all the new riffs and try to put them together combining our writing process with a pre-production process. We're going to make demos of new songs and as soon as we feel we have enough material, we're probably going to book the studio as soon as we can. The album definitely will come out before the end of 2008, and then it will all start over again, the touring cycle and everything.
We're really excited to pick up where we left off with The Great Cold Distance and see what we can do. We don't really know until we have the demos done where we really are going because it's such a delicate creative process to be writing and recording at the same time. We are very open to incorporating new sounds and crossing some borders here and there, but I don't think we will stray too much from what we did with The Great Cold Distance. We always try to improve ourselves, try to make everything one step up.
Q: For me, being a fan, I got into The Great Cold Distance pretty easily, but it wasn't until I listened to it a lot that I noticed all the subtle touches on it. Like the first time I noticed the percussion on "Increase," I was amazed that I hadn't noticed it before.
A: Right! I like that. That's really nice to hear.
Q: But that's what makes your music so rewarding. Once you get used to the songs, the choruses and all that, you start to notice things you didn't at first and it keeps you coming back. Like "Evidence," it's a really catchy, straightforward song, but the guitar solo, the rhythmic flourishes, the way the vocals intertwine near the end, these things add so much.
A: Yeah, it's there in the background, not really hiding, but it's there for you the more you listen to it. The subtle details, that's what we want to do. And also, especially the last album, it's not entirely created for it but if you use headphones with the album, you will definitely hear stuff going on that maybe you would not pick up otherwise.
This almost like a ritual for me, this is what I do every night before I go to bed. I always take one or two albums with me to bed, put out the lights and just lay there with headphones cranked. It's a pleasure for me to do this because it gives me so much, so this is what we really wanted to do with The Great Cold Distance as well.
Q: The live CD/DVD is out, and it was recorded at the Summer Breeze festival in Germany last August. From what I remember, the set list isn't too different from what you played here as an opener a few months later.
A: No, it's pretty much the same, I guess, because we had pretty much the same time on stage. This was also the problem actually for releasing this DVD, because I felt it was too short. It's not even an hour, it's like 50 minutes or something. I said I didn't want to put out the DVD because there's no extras on it, no bonus footage, no interviews, nothing juicy, nothing anything. I asked the label, "Can't we just hold onto this footage and put it as a bonus thing on our main upcoming DVD?" They said, "Sure, that's a good idea, but we can film another show for that. We want to release this right now." Well, I didn't want to start arguing with that, so I kind of gave in and said, "Okay, sure. I'm happy with the show, so if you want to release it, then let's do it."
Q: I was going to mention that, it seems short and not entirely representative of what you've been doing the last few years. At the same time, as a fan, I think older songs like "Cold Ways" or "Right Into the Bliss" sound excellent with your current lineup, and Jonas is a better, more confident vocalist now than he was when you made those albums.
A: Yes, you're right. And also, for the show, we actually got one of the best time slots, which we usually don't get. We got to go onstage at midnight, and at this time it's obviously super dark and it fits us perfectly. It was a little bit chilly in the air, a little bit of smoke and all this stuff. Total pitch black dark, and the audience was huge, many thousands of people. It was just the perfect setting for us. I think it shows that we enjoyed the show, we played pretty good.
It came out great that way, because otherwise if you see us playing a two in the afternoon with bright sun in our faces, it's not going to do us justice, you're not going to feel it. We're really dependent on the setting, actually, which is also why we honestly enjoy playing these intimate, small venues instead of too big a place. It's very easy for us to lose the atmosphere and not really get our message across that way. So this festival in the dark was really an exception to that, and this is why we agreed to release it.
Q: I wanted to ask you about something that was on your MySpace page a while ago. Do you have anything to do with that?
A: I'm involved with it. I have the password (laughs). I can jump in there, yeah.
Q: There was a statement under the "Influences" field, I don't remember the exact wording, but the gist was something about undertaking endeavors even if one knows they might fail. To me, that really summed up Katatonia because even though there's so much depression and dejection in the music, there's also hope, a sort of thing where you might know you'll fail but you'll try anyway. There's something both self-destructive and uplifting about that notion.
A: Definitely. This is a really, really vital and good point because I said before, it's not an image or anything. We're not striving to be dark, I think we can leave that for the gothic metal bands, actually. We're just trying to live our lives the best we can. We actually seek happiness, of course, but the darkness and all the mystery of life is part of it as well. We choose to write about it because musically, this is where we connect the most on a passion level.
I can't really understand myself why I'm that way. It's probably genetic, just the way you were born, why you enjoy this kind of music more than other kinds of music. But it doesn't say that you have to be a miserable fucking bastard every day, 24/7. This is a big misconception about Katatonia because when people meet us, "Wow, hey! Do they party? What the fuck?" It's like, come on, man, grow up. We have a lot of artistic integrity with Katatonia, we're very serious about it, but people have to realize there's more than that, too. Everything comes together for us in a natural way, so we have nothing to defend or anything. It's the way we are.
Q: You're still doing Bloodbath, correct? Are you working on anything with that?
A: Yeah, we still have it running. We cut a new mini-CD this summer. It's still to be released. We have some paperwork problems that are keeping us forbidden to say who the new lineup is, which is unfortunate because the clock is ticking and it's taking a lot of time. The whole music business bullshit is getting on my nerves, actually. But I'm not controlling the music biz, this is the way it is and I have to bite the bullet there. But as soon as that's sorted, we'll officially announce what's going on with Bloodbath, and believe me, there are plans. We definitely have big plans for Bloodbath because it's so much fun. It's like a different kind of pole to Katatonia. What we do in Bloodbath gets me even more inspired and creative with Katatonia, and vice versa with Bloodbath. The two work together in an opposite way really well.
Q: We would definitely like to see Bloodbath over here, too.
A: Oh yeah, I think that would go down really nice.
Q: We have a long history of death metal here, and people always come out to see the old Swedish bands.
A: (laughs) Yeah, Swedish death metal and American death metal, that's what's on the map for me.
Q: And I know you put Diabolical Masquerade to rest, but I love those albums a lot myself, they have so much personality.
A: That's great to hear. I think it just makes you happier and keeps you richer in your creativity. I obviously didn't want to put black metal ideas into Katatonia, so why not just get them out in a different project? For me, it's a blessing to do that, and the same with Bloodbath. Some people are actually a little bit disturbed that Katatonia members do Bloodbath because they don't see how it can fit. But I don't know where they're coming from, then, because we grew up with this stuff. We're all death metal fans since our teenage years and this is where we come from. I can see perfectly how it goes hand-in-hand. People just have to take their lessons and go back a little bit in history and it's all fine.
Q: What message would you like to convey to people who are unfamiliar with Katatonia?
A: If they're interested in us after they're read this, check out our last album. That represents us 100%. If they like that, then just jump on the wagon and see what we have coming up next.
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