Steeped in History and Preserved in Smoke: Euros Childs’ Cheer Gone

I’m quite a fan of now defunct band Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci (unfortunately, I only really got into them right before they broke up) – they’ve been criminally underrated and overshadowed by fellow Welsh bands with experimental, yet pastoral/psychedelic, tendencies like Super Furry Animals. Their gentle blend of folk, psychedelia, and wonky experimentalism has always given me a sunny feeling of endless fields of flowers in summer. A fair part of the appeal had always been lead singer, Euros Childs’ distinctive vocals that sound like he’s singing in Welsh even during the times when he actually isn’t – there’s something very lyrical and foreign to his sound and there’s a little bit of Bryan Ferry’s warble in there sometimes as well. So, when he went solo, I took interest, and I’ve actually been finding it rather difficult to keep up with the man; it seems every time I turn around, he’s released another album. In 2006, he released his debut album, Chops, which was an impressive beginning with more bouncy, gentle songs that veered between folk, country, and 50s rock and could have been on a GZM album, and then a year later, he released both Bore Da and The Miracle Inn; the former being a completely Welsh language record with rockier leanings, and the latter being more of a return to plonky piano-based tunes and English lyrics, including the rather epic title track. You get the impression that Childs just does as he pleases independent of its viability – it’s like he can’t help but be creative at all times, thus his output is constant and generally faster than most other artists out there. Now he released his fourth album, Cheer Gone, this past month, and Childs has continued to do what he does best: offbeat folk blended with multiple older styles. This time, mind, he has opted to dwell in a darker place lit by sputtering candles of happier memories.

The song, Autumn Leaves, begins the record with a lazy, sauntering twang that belies the fact this album was recorded in Nashville and sounds precisely like the lyrics say: “we’re just walking through autumn leaves.” I could picture it being on the GZM album Sleep/Holiday, and I wish I had been aware of it for my autumn mix a few weeks back. Continuing with a seasonal theme, the second track, Summer Days, is also laidback and Childs’ voice lulls me like a comfortable hammock in warm sun. Injecting some livelier energy, Her Ways is a rippling number with a folksy backbeat, recalling a simpler, pastoral time that likely never really existed in the first place. And speaking of older times, the following song, Nineteen Fifties, speaks to the utopian conception of an older, ostensibly happier, decade while it shuffles back and forth like teenagers on their first date at a sock-hop. As Childs beseeches the stars to answer why “she’s still in my mind,” he could be asking the universal question “why do teenagers fall in love?”. Conjuring up a darker mood, My Love is Gone sounds like an old Celtic lament mixed with banjos from the American deep south. Serving as a perfect interlude between two dark songs, Always Thinking of Her uses a lovely piano melody to temper a raw sadness. Farm Hand Murder returns to the dark currents of My Love is Gone as it spins the story of a doomed maiden from the perspective of the murderer as Childs’ vocals cling and then slip from black precipices of minor chords – it is the most haunting song I’ve ever heard from him.

Saving Up to Get Married once again falls into an older, picturesque time when love was a constant and you dream of marrying and living in “a cottage in the country with roses outside the door.” O Ein Dear is the only Welsh track on this particular record, and though, I can’t understand the lyrics, the gloomy, almost medieval, feel of the music conveys further reasons why the cheer may be gone. Medicine Head is a solemn hymn of heartbreak and memory with organ and harmonica complementing each other to brilliant effect. The album concludes rather surprisingly with the briefer Sing Song Song, a banjo-inflected and fiddle-strewn squaredance sort of number, which I suppose I can either interpret as a complete anomaly, an antidote for the wistful sadness permeating the rest of the album, or as a rather ironic twist where the narrator must “sing a little song” to comfort himself for an apparent loss and memories that won’t leave.

There is definitely something of an old soul about Euros Childs – he spans several genres while his voice and lyrics speak to some ancient way of life that is both as old and as magical as the mysterious precambrian rocks in Wales. In an odd way, his music feels like how an old wood-cut image would sound, steeped in history and preserved in smoke. This record, as its title suggests, is in a more melancholic vein than previous albums, but it is no less beautiful than Childs’ earlier humour-filled, upbeat tracks. I have a feeling that Euros Childs has been just as underrated as his former band, and that’s a shame when he can produce such a broad spectrum of emotions from unbridled celebration to dusky brooding, from bright green hills to vales shot through with rain. Please check this album out before he releases another one – he could be doing it as I write this.

Farm Hand Murder – Euros Childs

O Ein Dear – Euros Childs

Apple and Ritz: Meet the New A&R

We get bombarded with advertisements every day of our lives – directly and indirectly. It’s one of the reasons I don’t usually watch too much television, nor do I listen to much radio. As someone who took a communications diploma and majored in advertising, I have a particular disdain for what advertising creatives do. Sure, there are those really creative ads that make you sit up and see them as art, but I quickly learned that those are few and far between, and that whatever a client says (even when completely assinine) goes. When I got into advertising, I had pie-in-the-sky dreams of coming up with truly creative ways of presenting products – what I didn’t account for was the fact I’d always be selling something. And I couldn’t live with selling things I didn’t believe in. And I couldn’t fight for new ways of marketing things in a world with so much advertising noise pollution – even guerrilla marketing can only go so far. However, I will say I was ambushed by some relatively recent marketing by Apple and Ritz. And the fascinating part was the fact I didn’t feel inclined to purchase a colourful nano iPod nor Ritz crackers, but the music being featured.

Now, music in adverts isn’t a new concept, but most of the time they used to be jingles specifically written for the product or service. Some can be pretty catchy (“save big money at Menards,” anyone?), but they’re usually terrible pieces of music otherwise. And, of course, celebrity endorsement has been present for just as long, including musicians. My favourite advert is the iconic one featuring Peter Murphy for Maxell, but Pepsi has used pop artists to fairly large effect since the 80s and McDonalds matched up their slogan with a song by Justin Timberlake in a new bid for a jingle. I still remember those GAP ads from my high school years, which featured that guy from Phantom Planet with other people singing songs like Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough, Donovan’s Mellow Yellow, and Madonna’s Dress You Up in My Love, and I believe there were some winter GAP ads that featured Badly Drawn Boy. The difference in the noughties seems to be the fact that adverts for other products besides music are now breaking new bands in more and more conscious and deliberate ways. Rather than use songs that are already well-established, thus beneficial by their celebrity endorsement, these advertisers are using relatively obscure artists that the average audience wouldn’t know existed.

Because the music industry and market has become so fragmented and frail in terms of marketing power, especially to the “hip” kids, planting new (respectable) songs in commercials for other things is a way to reach people. In the process, the product actually being featured hopes to be positively associated with the “cool” musical act. In the world of advertising, credibility = truth, therefore, the more credible the celebrity endorsing the product is, the more credible the product itself is. It’s all about modality and control really – big advertisers have the money to control the advertised portion of reality, thus modality, that we see on a regular basis. At the same time, we, the audience, have become so jaded and cynical towards ads that advertisers realize that their power and control is becoming more limited. And, so, they hook up with labels and artists with much less financial power, thus less visibility, but with more credibility power, and a marketing symbiosis of power-sharing takes place.

The small bits of TV I was still watching in the past month featured both the ad for the colourful nanos and Ritz crackers several times, and every time I saw them, I thought to myself again, “I need to find out who sings those songs.” I finally bothered to this week, but as I suspected, many others had already beaten me to it. The song for the fourth generation nano iPods is by a Brooklyn synthpop band called Chairlift, who I had already heard about awhile ago, but not bothered to check them out, thus never made the connection between them and the advertisement. And the song featured in that incredibly short ad for Ritz (the above clip is an extended one that I’ve never seen aired – usually only the last 10 seconds is aired) is by Sheffield folk duo, Slow Club. What I find so fascinating about all this is how attached I became to 30 seconds or less of a song. It’s not often anymore that I fall for a song based on such a small sample. In each case, I always wanted the song to go on longer as I stared at the television set with anticipation and then regret. They’re both such beautifully twee songs in their own ways and with creative narratives built into them that I couldn’t help but take note.

Interestingly enough, when you go to purchase When I Go on iTunes, it actually has Ritz Commercial in parentheses next to it. There was an obvious assumption that people would search for this otherwise rather obscure song via the commercial it was associated with. However, it seems that this tactic can backfire. Companies like Apple, especially with their iPod and iTunes adverts, have tried to be as ahead of the curve as they could be, but in the case of whoever sang that Jerk It Out song, the hype seemed to die down pretty quick, making a one hit wonder situation. Like many A&R people, Apple is sometimes wrong, too.

Obviously not all ads attempting this cross-promotion affect me, but these two did. And I wonder whether I should feel dirty about the whole thing as I imagine all these coolhunters trawling the Internet for the next big thing in music just to sell one more box of crackers. Should it matter that I got some musical tips from advertisers? Am I being corrupted after all this time that I’ve avoided the solicitations from the music industry? I don’t think so. I’m starting to think that a song/band is either good or not, and no matter how they gain my attention, I should just do what I’ve always done: evaluate based on artistic merit alone. If the song happens to be part of a marketing tactic, that’s fine because I’m already fully aware it is. From what I can tell, both Chairlift and Slow Club are decent bands with several other great songs, so it doesn’t really matter where I first heard them. I suppose I can also comfort myself with the fact I never buy Ritz crackers or fourth generation nanos. Then again, I already own a second generation iPod nano.

Bruises – Chairlift

When I Go – Slow Club

Everyday is Like Sunday, Except for Blue Monday and Ruby Tuesday, and…Well, Friday I’m in Love: Weekly Mix #37

As I’m sure I mentioned in previous posts, I was an English major for my Honours BA, and as much as I found math and science relatively easy and comforting in their right/wrong answers, I’ve always found the arts more inspiring and generally more interesting for my understanding of the world. And oddly enough, taking English as a major forces you to contend with several other areas in the process, whether it be 18th century medicine or Aristotelian philosophy. By reading one novel, you can end up with knowledge of humanity, history, morality, economics and society. As much as I often bitch about picking apart a book until I no longer like the book at all, I have learned and formed a worldview that I would say is largely dependent on the books I’ve read.

I started reading on my own (no one can remember teaching me) when I was around three years old, and it just seemed completely natural. As soon as I could talk, I had already been inventing stories from the pictures I found in books, which gave the impression that I was reading to passersby in bookstores, but once I had discovered how to make sense of the words already there, I found a whole new world. My Grade One teacher named me The Library Lady and had me read to the rest of the class on a regular basis, showing me the power of literacy. I never had a shortage of books growing up, and thus, I never had a shortage of places I could visit. I read classics alongside modern novels, and I read guides to plants, animals, and minerals. I pretended that I was living in a little house on the prairies, or in a boxcar, or on my side of the mountain. I conversed with moles and toads, griffins and mock turtles, Indians in the cupboard and mice on motorcycles, and even moomins. I believed that I could be a writer like Emily of New Moon, or a spy like Harriet, or run away from camp like Rudy Miller. I went back to times of derring-do with Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe and The Scarlet Pimpernel, and much later, I found my way through medieval romances, gothic horrors and Enlightenment treatises, Situationist texts and Chomsky.

Over the past summer, I read books on topics ranging from the history of the Tower of Pisa to the gin craze of the 18th century to the history of the Basque people, and that was the light reading to distract me from the heavier stuff I was dealing with while writing my MA thesis. Books have not only transported me other places and times, but they have also given me the foundation and context for the places I’ve experienced firsthand. So, Shakespeare’s Richard III was probably Tudor propaganda, but that in itself matters, and it also made me feel the meaning of Bosworth Battlefield beneath my feet four years ago, much more salient than if some tour guide had told me about it. I also firmly believe that my sense of humour and comedic timing came just as much from Gordon Korman as it did from Bugs Bunny.

I was just reminded of how fantastic books are last night as our power had to be cut off from 11:30 pm til the next morning (one of the reasons this post is late). In the absence of all else, I could entertain myself for hours just by reading by candlelight – simple and wonderful. And so books have always been alive for me. They have been loyal companions and made just about everything seem possible. And libraries and bookstores continue to be places of refuge for me, where I can meander and browse, deliberately seeking out those more obscure books spined in amongst the “popular” books that receive a facing. When I worked at a bookstore, I made a point of facing books that never usually get to be because of their initial low quantities (my problem with bookselling practices can be dealt with at a later date). Just because upper management decided that Breakfast on Pluto wasn’t an important read, and thus not a good seller, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t get a fair shot against the pathetic likes of Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts – I wanted to give a chance to the decent books that actually say something.

Because of my love for language and the written word, I’ve also always gravitated towards those musical artists with strong lyrical content or some evidence that they, too, read books. I will also freely admit that I learned nearly as much from listening to the Manics (via the books they directed me to) as I have from some university courses. More and more educators are also beginning to realize the value in popular music and its interpretations of literature, making popular music a viable teaching tool, especially for youth. So, this week’s mix is all about literature, featuring songs that either reinterpret a piece of literature, reference literature or reference an author. While researching a bit for this mix, I learned about several references I hadn’t noticed before, which was definitely time well-spent. (Random tangent: I keep hearing part of ABC’s The Look of Love near the end of Patrick Wolf’s Tristan, and I often wonder if I’m the only one.) A good song is just as brilliant as a good book, and when they truly tell a brilliant story, whether original or borrowed, they demonstrate why a music collection can be referred to as a library. This mix is called Sight Reading.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. – Vladimir Nabokov

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Gravity’s Rainbow – Klaxons (Reference: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow)

Wild Boys – Duran Duran (Reference: William S. Burroughs’ The Wild Boys)

Love and Destroy – Franz Ferdinand (Reference: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita)

1984 – David Bowie (Reference: George Orwell’s 1984)

Song For Clay (Disappear Here) – Bloc Party (Reference: Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero)

Tristan – Patrick Wolf (Reference: The Tristan Legend Cycle)

Atrocity Exhibition – Joy Division (Reference: JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition)

Venus in Furs – The Velvet Underground (Reference: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs)

Killing an Arab – The Cure (Reference: Albert Camus’s The Stranger)

Albert Camus – Titus Andronicus

Day of the Triffids – Ash (Reference: John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids)

Lolita – Elefant (Reference: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita)

My Iron Lung – Radiohead (Reference: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49)

R.P. McMurphy – Manic Street Preachers (Reference: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)

Rattlesnakes – Lloyd Cole and the Commotions (Reference: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays)

Something Wicked – British Sea Power (Reference: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth)

Cemetry Gates – The Smiths

Macbeth – John Cale (Reference: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth)

A Picture of Dorian Gray – Television Personalities (Reference: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray)

Golden Hair – Syd Barrett (Reference: James Joyce’s “Poem V”)

Billy Liar – The Decemberists (Reference: Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar)

Wuthering Heights – Kate Bush (Reference: Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights)

November Rain – Guns ‘n Roses (Reference: Del James’s “Without You”)

A Drunken Man’s Praise of Sobriety – Elvis Costello (Reference: William Butler Yeats’s “A Drunken Man’s Praise of Sobriety”

Sylvia Plath – Ryan Adams

Last Night Electro Saved My Sanity: MSTRKRFT in WNNPG

The first time MSTRKRFT came through Winnipeg I didn’t bother going and then I regretted it. When you realize that the only artists from Modular that you will ever get a chance to see come to your city are Wolfmother and MSTRKRFT, you start to panic when you miss the better of the two. Of course I had seen one half of MSTRKRFT a couple of years back when he opened for Nine Inch Nails in Death From Above 1979, and I loved it. When Jesse F. Keeler hooked up with Al-P to become MSTRKRFT, I fell in love with their brand of electro beats that sit well next to the likes of Justice, Daft Punk and Simian Mobile Disco. Not to mention their stunning remixing abilities. So, needless to say, I decided that I just had to go to the Exchange Event Centre last night for MSTRKRFT without a second thought. Oddly enough, it only hit me much (much) later that night that a show like this was a different beast from the ones I normally attend. Throughout the night I discovered the difference between a traditional live gig and a DJ gig, and in some ways, the similarities, too. And for some reason, I can’t say I had ever given much thought to it before.

The time advertised for the gig was 9pm, but thankfully, my friend, Lisa, and I didn’t really show up til 10 because, as we soon discovered, that still meant we had another two hours to go before the opener Felix Cartal came on. As we ventured further into the club, I started thinking the idiotic pseudo-bouncer needn’t have scrutinized my ID so keenly. All he had to do was clock the level of my awkwardness and displacement in a place like this. The reasons why I never was a clubber came flooding back to me as drunken couples groped each other and girls tottered around in high heels and short shorts. The music preceding the actual show, while infinitely better than the stuff played at Top 40 bars, wasn’t particularly inspiring nor distinguishable (aside from snatches of Hot Chip and Justice), and Lisa and I found ourselves seated at the back of the club, yawning from the stressful day’s work we had already put in at her office. And probably from rapidly encroaching old age as well. So, as any good curmudgeon would do, we sat there mocking the younger people around us.

There were the girls in matching gold shoes, holding hands like they were part of some nightclub buddy system. There was a b-boy wannabe with a hockey mask permanently perched atop his head (and baseball cap), which led us to the conclusion that the sole purpose of the mask was to keep his hat in place. There was the guy who appeared to be leading an invisible conga line up and down the club, chugging away like the little engine that had no dance partners. There was a guy in neon green sunglasses – a Corey Hart of the long-lost rave scene. One of our personal favourites was Mr. Tall and Awkward, who seemed to be roaming aimlessly alone and waiting for MSTRKRFT – we felt that he was a kindred spirit. Nearly every girl looked like she was trying too hard while nearly every boy looked like he didn’t care one iota for trying at all. And many seemed very tied up with mediating and commemorating their own experience whether by digital photo or mobile text. But like pretty much most gigs I’ve been to, I got the distinct feeling that it was more of an opportunity to be seen rather than to hear a particular artist’s music. It was all very interesting from an anthropological standpoint, but the night was beginning to wear on us. At midnight, Felix Cartal came on, but honestly, I didn’t get much out of him – there were some fairly dissonant and jarring mixes happening, and his set just ended up feeling too repetitive and not enough to get me anywhere near the sweaty, flying limbs on the dancefloor. It’s not like I couldn’t stand it, but it’s more like I wasn’t affected by it.

However, when MSTRKRFT took the stage, I began my stealth journey to the centre of the dancefloor. That pulsing, persistent 4/4 rock beat that makes MSTRKRFT one of my favourite electro acts soothed my otherwise stressed out body and propelled me further and further into the inner core of gyrating bodies. Aside from the sweat raining down on me from the shirtless, grinding idiot atop the platform and the rather fierce knee to the back of my head from another dancer on the aforementioned platform, I had a pretty euphoric time. I literally lost myself in the music, usually shutting my eyes and moving like a de-programmed robot (no sexy dance from me). I was whipping my head around so fast that I became completely disoriented and detached from the people moving around me. Between the unsure footing rolling on top of discarded glow sticks and the green lights spidering across the ceiling and walls, I seemed to effectively separate my mind from my body. While I caught glimpses of MSTRKRFT on the stage from time to time, rather than focusing on the artist, I focused on the music in a new way. But at the same time, I couldn’t tell you exactly what was being played or remixed at every moment, and that was okay. It was pure feeling without concentration – perhaps it was the bliss of a brief numbness to the outside world. Like that moment in the film I Heart Huckabees when Mark Wahlberg and Jason Schwartzman smack themselves in the head with a big plastic ball to achieve a state of non-thought for a fleeting moment. But this was for an hour and a half. And it included a complete abandoning of kinesthetic sense. As I made my way back up the stairs from my drowning on the dancefloor, I felt like I had sea legs.

One of the memorable highlights for me was the remix that featured bits of Hot Chip and then pieces of Happy Mondays’ Hallelujah. I also recognized their remix of fellow labelmate Wolfmother’s Woman, Justice’s D.A.N.C.E. (apparently a hot track for the night considering it was played in some form three different times) and Kylie Minogue’s Wow along with the odd track off of debut LP, The Looks and, of course, latest single Bounce/Vuvuvu. The set ended with a rather jubilant remix of Daft Punk’s One More Time, which allowed for audience participation akin to the live shows I’m accustomed to as MSTRKRFT dampened the vocals and everyone joined in for the “Don’t stop the dancin’” refrain. By the end of the night (or early morning), I felt just as exhausted and vindicated as I do leaving any good show, yet knowing that it was the show itself and not the environment that I had fallen for. I could do without most of the people and without the preamble of parading poseurs, but there is always life-preservation in good music. In this case, it was postmodern pastiche as remedy for the postmodern condition.

This tour is continuing on into the US, so if you live in any of the cities they’re hitting, get tickets and let MSTRKRFT’s beats give you that pummeling gift of oblivion for one night. Fist of God, indeed.

The Looks – MSTRKRFT

Bounce ft. N.O.R.E. (Felix Cartal Remix) – MSTRKRFT

Woman (MSTRKRFT Remix) – Wolfmother

Ceolakanth is Android (MSTRKRFT Remix) – Polysics

Testing My Devotion: Cold War Kids’ Loyalty to Loyalty

I quite liked the Cold War Kids’ debut album Robbers & Cowards, especially the song We Used to Vacation, a shambolic yet soulful story of a hopeless alcoholic father. There was almost something Jeff Buckleyesque in Nathan Willett’s vocals that made my spine shiver a little, and there was something a bit rough and sordid about the narratives in their songs that suited their gritty, bluesy sound. Their sophomore album Loyalty to Loyalty just released on September 23, and while it still maintains some of the soulfulness and bluesiness of the first album, I have to admit that I’m disappointed with it as a whole. There are moments when it just feels like they’re searching for a tune and for an authenticity that just isn’t there. I don’t believe that they believe in what they’re singing this time – it’s like the first album made me think of sepia-toned photographs and this one is still sepia-toned…but manufactured in Photoshop. Willett’s distinctive yelp used to add emotional meaning to the songs, but by the end of this album, it just feels hollow and grating.

Against Privacy begins the album with a smattering of cymbals, a lackadaisical backbeat, and guitars which somehow end up sounding like muted trombones. With its political lyrics and persistent groove, it promises more than the album actually ends up delivering. It is followed by Mexican Dogs, which is also one of the better songs on the album with its tight shuffle and warbling guitars. Every Valley is Not a Lake had already made an appearance on the Hang Me Up to Dry single last year, and it still grooves just as wonderfully as the first time I heard it – I absolutely love that gritty piano line. It’s just unfortunate the only song that really makes an impression on me is one I heard a year ago. After these first three tracks, the album

I’m still trying to puzzle out what I think about Something is Not Right With Me, the lead-off single for the album; it borrows from shouty electro, but with pounding piano instead of synthesizers and electric guitars – it’s like the White Stripes go disco. Perhaps something is just not right with it. It is at this point that the album descends into a nondescript blandness with songs like Welcome to the Occupation, I’ve Seen Enough, and Dreams Old Men Dream. On the track Golden Gate Jumpers, Willett’s voice sounds like Rufus Wainwright against a honky-tonk backdrop, and Willett returns to a Wainwright vocal sound on the track On the Night My Love Broke Through, but it lacks the gentle tenderness and simplicity of a song like Robbers off the debut album. The fact the Buckley vocals have seemingly slipped further towards a Wainwright sound implies a move from fragile soulfulness into vaudeville theatricality.

The nadir of the whole record is Avalanche in B, which is composed of a muffled, drunken-sounding vocal and a beat that is so laden in the back that it drags the song into a rather muddled unpleasantness. Every Man I Fall For is an admirable attempt at telling a story from the opposite gender’s point of view, but the sentiment gets lost in the underwhelming melody. Like Something is Not Right With Me, the penultimate track, Relief, utilizes some buzzing electronic elements, and with Willett’s falsetto, they almost pull it off; somehow these forays into the electronic still don’t seem quite natural. The album ends with Cryptomnesia, a song that showcases Willett’s voice as the piano and brushed drums fade into the background before swelling to meet his yelping crescendo, and while I would think that such a build-up would move me, the song simply fails to.

As with most bands that had great debut albums, I really wanted to like Cold War Kids’ sophomore effort, but I didn’t get any of those spine shivery moments on this album but for the one song that had been released last year. The dirty spirituality has dissipated into a meandering sludge and the honesty behind the lyrics of songs like We Used to Vacation seems to have disappeared as the band oversteps its boundaries of life experience and abilities to imagine. I probably shouldn’t have bothered with this post at all, but I suppose sometimes I’m done in by my own sense of loyalty.

Against Privacy – Cold War Kids

Every Valley is Not a Lake – Cold War Kids

The Mythos of the Mixtape

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind”, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules.

Ah, the mixtape. It’s the bonkers sort of logic in the above passage that made me really identify with Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity with such fervor when I read it for the first time six or seven years ago. As crazy as this detailed, agonized analysis is to regular people and casual music fans, it makes such completely perfect sense to me and has done for at least the past 11 years of my life. Even when my taste was pretty pitiful and the majority of my music was being recorded off the radio, I had a feel for the aesthetic of the mixtape and its “rules.” It’s precisely why the shuffle function on both my iTunes and iPod can often grate on me (unless by some beautiful serendipity it seems to read my mind or place songs I would never have put together side by side and they work). And it’s why I actually got angry at work one morning.

There was a year where I was doing inventory counting every weekday morning from 7 to 10 at the bookstore I was working at. Though the hours were hellish for a night owl like me, the job was actually easy enough and the best part for me was the fact we were allowed to play whatever music we wanted to in the morning (as opposed to bookstore-appropriate fare that had to be played when the store was actually open). I started bringing my own CDs on a regular basis and many of them were carefully crafted mixes (though my three co-counters and I had an informal agreement about equal rights to play whatever we wanted, I fully admit that I monopolized it). Then some time toward the end of my stint as a morning shift person, there was a morning when other co-workers had to come in for some early morning tasks and the music took a revolting turn. It wasn’t even that I didn’t like what was being played (which I admittedly didn’t) because I understand that everyone has their own musical tastes. I was getting increasingly irritated and then irate because the music made no sense in the order it was being played – Michael Jackson played adjacent to some band like Nickelback, which was then followed by Christina Aguilera, and then some mainstream country song. I guess it ran like a Top 40 radio playlist, utterly random. And I felt like I was going mad with a multiple personality disorder.

I started ranting to a co-worker, who had relatively pretentious music tastes, about the abhorrent assortment and order of the music being played. He agreed with me, but neither of us could figure out who would put songs together so haphazardly on the same CD. When he finally went to investigate, he discovered that someone had put several mix CDs on shuffle. Not only were the mixes, as separate entities, incoherent, but they were being remixed by a cold-hearted machine. The last straw came when two of the original co-counters quit and others joined the shift. They felt perfectly all right with putting their CDs in with my mix. On shuffle. Okay, so it’s not exactly the reason I quit. But it could have been.

I felt offended on the music’s behalf – how could someone treat songs as though they had no meaning in relation to anything else? As though they didn’t deserve to be presented artfully? To me, it’s the equivalence of a painting with clashing colours or a lack of spatial harmony. Even postmodern paintings, which appear to break all rules, have something behind them trying to be communicated, so if there are clashes or misuses, they are deliberate and still mean something. On some level they should still be aesthetically pleasing. Otherwise you may as well be listening to the hamfisted radio.

There is also something specifically mythological about the mixtape, though. It requires a forethought that CD mixes and computer playlists don’t. It requires a thorough knowledge of one’s music collection – a knowledge of how a song sounds, what mood it conveys, without actually having to listen to it first. If you make an error, you have to rewind and retape. Sometimes you do this several times before you get it right. If you’re taping from vinyl, it requires an even more delicate touch and timing. You have to account for time limitations per side (in my early days of mixtape-making I had several incidents where the tape ran out in the middle of a song). You have to decide whether the second side will differ or change theme or mood. And how you’ll manage to transition between tempos and styles.

When I was in high school, I was so obsessed with links between songs that I made a series of about 12 tapes that had a constant link (whether verbally or thematically) from song to song and tape to tape that I took with me on a band trip to Europe. For a group project in English class, I volunteered to make the intro tape to our presentation – the only real criticism our teacher had about the entire project was the fact the tape was too long. I couldn’t stop finding lines in songs about the theme of corruption and taping them seamlessly together. To compile it, it took me hours in front of the double cassette deck in our den, but I didn’t notice. And this artform extended beyond the music and to the tape cover art. I imitated my dad’s habit of cutting images and words out of magazines and making mini-collages to insert in my mixtapes’ cases (you can view some of those teenage attempts in the above photo – and, yes, that is a Mind the Gap sign slapped across Britney Spears’s head). It was a challenge trying to make something that visually conveyed what the mix was aurally and that also fit within the strict confines of a tape case. But this added DIY element just made the mixtape matter all the more to me.

I miss mixtapes. And I know I’m not the only one because countless other bloggers make “mixtape” posts on a regular basis or treat their entire blog like a mixtape shared with friends, and applications like muxtape and devices like mixas continue to confirm this need for the mixtape ethos. (The unfortunate and unnecessary demise of muxtape is fodder for a different post at a different time.) This sharing aspect is just as signficant as the artform itself. Mixtapes are meant to make connections between music lovers – music is both a way of conveying ideas and emotions and a way of opening up others’ musical horizons and exposing them not only to new music, but new thoughts and new feelings. The DIY aesthetic for mixtapes speaks to something beyond the ugly commercialized aspect of music as an industry. It speaks to an indie myth – a myth of making art for the sake of art and for the people who enjoy it, who then create more art because of it.

I don’t think I’ve made an actual mixtape for the past two years (and the only reason I was still making them up til that point was because our car still only has a tape player in it), and I’m sad about this. But now of course I make weekly mixes for download on this blog, and I look forward to it every week with more anticipation than most people would consider healthy – even when I feel a bit stumped as to what my theme will be. I put just as much care into crafting these mixes as I did as a teenager making mixtapes, and whether people actually download all of the songs in each mix, or whether they even notice the fact they’re in a particular order, I can never truly know. All I know is that I deliberately put them in that order and that they are meant to be listened to in that order. The method to the madness is in the selection and arrangement, and it’s these aspects of the method that keep me tied up in front of the computer for entire afternoons and evenings.

I suppose the art of the mixtape is linked to the ethos of the ultimate fan. Fans not only compulsively collect, but they also arrange. The way a collection, whether it’s diecast car models, stamps or sports cards, is organized and displayed is just as important as the collection itself because it’s a way of presenting disparate things in relation to each other and making a bigger meaning than any item could have on its own. And isn’t that what’s at the heart of the mixtape?

**I’m in the process of working on a year-end round-up of all of my weekly mixes, so come December there will be quite the special (and lengthy) edition of Everyday is Like Sunday, Except for Blue Monday and Ruby Tuesday, and…Well, Friday I’m in Love.**

It Started With a Mixx – Los Campesinos

DIY – Robots in Disguise