Secondly, in order to perpetually force myself to 'have things to blog about', I'm going to start doing a 'weekly' (i.e., whenever I can be bothered to do it) column of reviewing new singles (or 'tracks', as one is supposed to call them these days). I'll even give them little ratings out of five with cute little ♪ symbols, where ♪ signifies meritless tripe and ♪♪♪♪♪ = amazing amazing amazing. So here's the first installment in a regular series.
Cascada - Evacuate The Dancefloor
'Guess who's back with a brand new track?' some wag asks the listener some way through 'Evacuate The Dancefloor', and you'd be forgiven for not immediately answering 'Cascada'. After five years of churning out basically the same characterless euro-trance song over and over again, Cascada has defied all expectations, and - by some miraculous historical coincidence - managed to produce a song that sounds exactly like Lady Gaga. And I mean exactly. 'Evacuate The Dancefloor' is perhaps the single most derivative thing I have ever heard; by the time some cut-price Colby O'Donis shows up (exhorting us to 'shake that thang') you can't help but laugh at the sheer, shameless opportunistic gall of it.
Weirdly, though, 'Evacuate The Dancefloor' is perhaps the most likable thing Cascada have ever done. The bandwagon-jumping is done so tackily, and so blatantly, that it's hard to get too mad at it - and, whisper it soft, but it turns out even Natalie Horler has more charm than Lady Gaga. And 'Evacuate The Dancefloor' has a better bridge than 'Just Dance', too. (One of my many pop theories - it's a good bridge, more than a good chorus, that makes a good pop song.) I think they ripped the bridge off from the last Britney album, which makes it the best bit of the song by virtue of having the best source material.
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Mastodon - Oblivion
Mastodon's recent album, Crack The Skye, is - on one level - a big mad metal story about astral projection and Rasputin and stuff like that. On another level, it's about drummer and lyricist Brann Dailor working through his unresolved issues about his sister's suicide by making a big mad metal album about astral projection and Rasputin. As such, the album's mood is a bit more somber than the band's typical fare. Crack The Skye really works best when heard in its entirety, which is why Mastodon have been performing it track-by-track at recent gigs; and the moody, slow-burning new single 'Oblivion' definitely works best as the album's opening track, in which context its simmering tension feels like it's, you know, going somewhere. Some people will always - understandably - prefer to hear Mastodon thrashing harder than this, and barking furious, intense non-sequiturs about whales, ogres and giant glass moths. But it's undeniably cool to hear them so effortlessly reaching for, and pulling off, new moods and textures.
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Enter Shikari - Juggernauts
Few bands are quite as have-your-cake-and-eat-it as Enter Shikari. Their brilliant 2007 debut album, Take To The Skies, saw them welding together two ostensibly alien genres - hardcore dance music and post-hardcore punk - and, astonishingly, doing justice to the full visceral impact of both. So the heavy bits are fucking heavy, the dancy bits are properly dancy, and they are tied together by hooks the size of skyscrapers and as many schizophrenic stops and starts and time signature changes as anybody could reasonably want. They are, all in all, a great argument against the idea that extreme/underground music genres (hard dance, punk) are best off staying underground, not taking in influences from other genres or making concessions to (spit) pop, lest their extremity, their impact, be dulled. Enter Shikari make having it all seem like a lot more fun.
This spirit of musical generosity, the refusal to have one idea when ten will do, is what ultimately makes new single 'Juggernauts' a winner. The band can certainly be more jarring than this, but 'Juggernauts' is still all over the place. Its world-eating chorus sounds like it'd be right at home on daytime radio, but nothing around it is polite enough to resemble a 'verse', with frontman Rou Reynolds alternately delivering Mike Skinner-esque raps and having an extended dialogue with a Greek chorus of gang-shouted backing vocals. There's a brief appearance of that brilliantly ridiculous screaming voice he does that sounds like Scooby Doo fronting At The Drive-In. The pessimistic sociology in the lyrics may (or may not) turn out to be a load of bollocks on closer analysis but, god damn it, at least they're trying. I'd rather bands were saying "the idea of community will be something displayed in a museum" than spouting empty moon-June imagery. A young English band has written a mediation on the collapse of capitalism, bolted it to polyrhythmic electro-punk, and gotten it into the charts. What more do you want? I'd rather have this than the fucking Pigeon Detectives.
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The Saturdays - Work
Of course, I'd rather have this than the fucking Pigeon Detectives, as well. 'Work' is relatively unremarkable manufactured pop, but there remains something tremendously charming and likeable about The Saturdays. I think it comes from their refusal to do anything more than look pretty and dance about, and the implied insistence that that should be enough. Maybe I'm just sick of pop stars who seem to think that I should be impressed by them kissing other girls, or losing their keys and phone. I'm not. It's boring. If all you've got is a catchy pop song, make like The Saturdays and don't pretend otherwise. Because that's more than enough.
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Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll
These days, we're awash with glamorous, synthy girl-pop, which means that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs circa 2009 feel, if anything, even more in key with the zeitgeist of the times than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs circa 2002 did. They're still outclassing much of the competition, as well: 'Heads Will Roll' is the second borderline-perfect single from their borderline-perfect It's Blitz! album. The band make this sort of brooding strut seem like the easiest thing in the world - dark moody synths, keening guitars, robotic drumbreaks, and Karen barking at you to "dance till you're dead". Resistance is futile.
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Pet Shop Boys - Did You See Me Coming?
Pet Shop Boys are probably one of the greatest bands of all time. Their best work, though, has always had a bit more to say, in one way or another, than this latest offering does. It's a shame to hear Neil Tennant singing cod-witticisms like "you don't have to be in Who's Who to know what's what" over some undistinguished pseudo-Daft Punk backing track. Where the greatest moments in the storied PSB back catalogue play bluff and double-bluff with the detached, deadpan airiness of Tennant's vocals, here they just sound genuinely disinterested. It might seem a bit unfair to condemn 'Did You See Me Coming?' for not being as good as the Pet Shop Boys' best songs - after all, what is? But it's hard to imagine anyone caring about this song if it wasn't trading off the PSB name and lineage.
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Lady Gaga - Paparazzi
This is an odd one. I haven't really made a secret of my hostility to Lady Gaga. She's taken the Madonna syndrome to new heights of self-parody: act as if you are an icon, present yourself as a celebrity, and you will become one. Then everything you do, and say, and wear is automatically significant by virtue of the fact that you are doing it. Lady Gaga's construction of herself as an icon seems to depend, somehow, upon inducing the belief that she is weird, alien, dangerous. But 'Just Dance' and 'Poker Face' are about as musically threatening as S Club 7, and the trappings around the music - which we are encouraged to read as much more important - enact nothing more than Lady Gaga's own act of willing herself into celebrity; in other words, her clothes, videos and so on are constituted only as declarations of their own importance. In the final analysis, Lady Gaga represents nothing more than a celebration of this very circularity, this very emptiness.
'Paparazzi' is her best single to date because it admits all of the above. It sounds hollow, empty, dead, her voice floating in space - detached, and processed to the point of inhumanity. She sings like she's got champagne and cocaine running through her veins instead of blood. She uses the language of celebrity as a metaphor for love, and in doing so reveals how devoid of love that language is. "We're plastic, but we still have fun," she announces, but the listener is surely not supposed to believe her. The ludicrous, eight-minute video portrays Lady Gaga at the centre of a glamorous lifestyle filled with loveless sex, violence and death - no one has any fun. The thing is, Lady Gaga's whole career has been a set-up for this kind of comedown, this kind of ultimate disappointment and horror in the glamour and decadance she revels in, because she never convincingly made it sound like any fun in the first place. That's why she can't enact any real horror, even here - she never cared enough to start with, this was all there ever was. 'Paparazzi' is a dull echo of love, and of life. Anyone who still takes Lady Gaga's constructed world as an aspirational model has now, at least, been fairly warned. Here be monsters.
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Passion Pit - The Reeling
So I've just listened to 'The Reeling' straight after 'Paparazzi', and in terms of the great synthpop spectrum, you can't imagine two records being more different. 'The Reeling' couldn't possibly sound more alive, more human, with all that implies. The song sounds like a collision of everyone - from Erasure to The Flaming Lips - who ever aimed a shaky falsetto at the heavens in some paradoxical form of euphoric melancholy, who ever realised that happiness makes you cry and that crying can make you happy. Michael Angelakos starts the song digging himself into an emotional hole from which he "cannot feel the wind, can't feel the rain or cold", as if he needs to leave his feelings behind to protect himself from the ugly world, but he can't. "I believe in gentle harmony," he declares, "oh, how I loathe all this obscenity!" Before long he's got what sounds like the kids from Justice's 'D.A.N.C.E.' cooing backing vocals behind him in encouragement. If this doesn't make you feel something then you fucking deserve Lady Gaga.
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The Killers - A Dustland Fairytale
If you think 'eighties revival', what sort of sounds does that imply? When The Killers emerged five or six years ago, weilding synths and donning eyeliner, they were framed as 21st century new romantics, the most British-sounding American band we'd ever heard. So everyone was shocked when they reinvented themselves as bearded purveyors of Springsteen-esque Americana, suddenly becoming the most American-sounding band on the face of the planet. Some relatively superficial changes had somehow transformed synthy, androgynous eighties cool into blokey, tedious eighties AOR - i.e., very very uncool.
The Killers, though, were only reenacting what actually happened in the eighties. Androgynous British synth weirdos like Culture Club and Eurythmics took over the world (and the US charts) in the early eighties with a brand of tasteful, unthreatening, adult-oriented white soul; this musical formula was repackaged in the form of meat-and-potatoes FM rock, Proper Music by Proper Blokes like Phil Collins, Sting and, of course, Springsteen. It's the sound of Live Aid, of the Rock Aristocracy taking control again after being disrupted by punk and post-punk. You wanted the eighties, you got the fucking eighties.
Anyway, none of that has much to do with how terrible 'A Dustland Fairytale' is, which is to say - very, very fucking terrible. It's a Springsteen parody which would be absurd if it wasn't so totally tedious. By far the best thing The Killers have done post-Hot Fuss is 'When You Were Young', because it goes beyond Springsteen into Meat Loaf territory in its hilarious, OTT ridiculousness. 'A Dustland Fairytale', by contrast, plods along uninterestingly, insulating itself in its own lack of passion, lest anybody question Brandon Flowers' blue-collar seriousness. Flowers is as far removed as possible from the theatrical, convulsing fits of sexual jealousy that animated him on 2004's still-brilliant 'Mr Brightside'. The lesson? It's the same lesson Adam Ant gave us right at the beginning of the eighties, as he more or less single-handedly declared the decade open for business, and it's one of the single most important lessons in the history of pop music: 'ridicule is nothing to be scared of'. The Killers are scared, and they are the enemy.
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Kasabian - Fire
God, I can hardly even bring myself to care. I will say one thing, though. The lesson of Kasabian should be that we stop coding guitars as 'retrogressive' and the recognition of house and hip-hop as 'futuristic'. It's that fallacy that might lead one into thinking that Kasabian are more 'interesting' than, for instance, Oasis. Using hip-hop-derived rhythms - rather than blues-based ones - to soundtrack your beery machismo does not make that beery machismo any less idiotic and conservative. And yes, you might be able to get away with being as idiotic and conservative as you like if you've got songs as good as 'Cigarettes & Alcohol' or, for that matter, 'Nuthin But A G Thang'. Kasabian don't, and 'Fire' is their worst single to date, mediocre and just boring in the worst possible way.
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Basement Jaxx - Raindrops
One sort of divide in dance music - detached, urbane, robotic subtlety (minimal techno, and anything which looks back to Detroit techno and Kraftwerk) versus busy, dense, euphoric, hook-rammed party noise (anything that sees its roots in rave culture or disco). I care for the former paradigm as much as the next man - Ben Klock's minimal techno opus One is one of my favourite albums of 2009 - but if you actually want people to dance, you should probably bang on some Basement Jaxx. The Jaxx have consistently repped the vision of dance music that is as maximalist and euphoric as possible, filled with as many noises and rhythms and multicultural influences as a simple, sexy pop song can withstand. And all this while still being groovy and subtle and feminine. Their classic 2001 single 'Romeo' did all of this beautifully; 'Raindrops' feels like a sequel to 'Romeo', and just might be even better.
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Röyksopp featuring Robyn - The Girl And The Robot
I adore Robyn, as is pretty common knowledge, and I feel like I've been waiting a loooong time to hear her drop some new material. This Röyksopp collaboration will have to do for now, and it's pretty damn good. "I go mental every time you leave for work, you never seem to know when to stop" Robyn protests - "I never know when you'll return, I'm in love with a robot!" Harsh, dark electronica that critiques capitalism's brutal, mechanising effect on the individual, and its consequent deleterious effect on human relationships? Go on then.
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