Everything Old Is Old Again

Digitalism, "Zdarlight" (Moonlight remix)
MSTRKRFT, "Easy Love"

Here's a fun little game: Ask most music critics what they thought of 2005 as a year. Odds are pretty good that they'll say 2005 had a bunch of good singles, but it's pretty hard to make a case for the year being any good unless you've got extraordinary tunnel vision with regards to the music you like (i.e. skinny-tie indie, super-produced girl-pop, Houston rap, etc). This is, of course, exactly as uncreative an answer as it is a true one; generally speaking, every year has a fistful of singles and a sliver of albums showing wild, imaginative growth, although it tends to stick out most when the year is pretty bad (q.v. 1985 and "Under Mi Sleng Teng", "Kings Of Rock", and Psychocandy). But 2005 had an interesting little undercurrent going on, one which (I think) gives any opinions about the year a telling inflection - namely, that 2005 was the year leaks went big-time.

Leaked records are of course nothing new; I can still remember all the Radiohead fans around USC flipping their lids when Kid A hit Audiogalaxy back in the back-when, and that was six years ago (christ). But until 2005, leaks were more of an event than a phenomenon - even as file-sharing exploded and people got used to an exponentially expanded sense of access to music, we were more or less tied to the scheduled physical release of the album. Then, right before I went home for Christmas break in 2004, the LCD Soundsystem and MIA records appeared out of nowhere, and all of a sudden everyone was moving at the speed of rock critics regardless of whether or not they'd ever formed a cogent opinion in their life, not that that's ever necessarily been a prerequisite to write about music, mind you.

The cool thing about being a rock critic in this day and age, after all, isn't that you get free records - everyone with the internet gets free records whether they're supposed to or not - but rather that you get them early, ostensibly so that you can have a chance to fully put them through a workout in order to better separate the wheat from the chaff. Of course, critics get records early supposedly because they're fitting them into a more expansive and nuanced context - that's not necessarily true for Joe U2 Fan who, all of a sudden, has the ability to check out all sorts of crazy, unexpected stuff right at the moment of detonation. This is, of course, awesome; music is always best right when it feels like it's happening, which is why we're not listening to Pet Sounds instead of White Rose Movement. But a few months down the line - and I'm speaking with the full weight of experience here - you become conscious of the motions hype sends you through, which in turn makes you more self-conscious about your reactions, which in turn makes you less inclined to get hyped up over an album, which in turn makes you check out fewer albums, which in turn leads you to call 2005 a shitty year without a lot of worthwhile stuff. It's a vicious cycle, and unfortunately I don't know who else to blame for it except James Murphy and Daft Punk.

Given the monumental influence both bands have exerted over my musical outlook, I really do hate to talk about an album by either LCD Soundsystem or Daft Punk in anything other than the most glowingly hushed tones, but sometimes the truth is a motherfucker, and the truth is that LCD Soundsystem and Human After All may well have been the two most disappointing records of last year for me. That's not to say they're bad, of course - I probably would have been a huge fan of LCD in particular if I hadn't already been intimately familiar with the singles that preceded it, some of which accomplish everything the album reaches for by themselves - but it's entirely possible for a record to suck hardboiled eggs through a straw compared to the record you've been wanting in your head, even when the actual record isn't anything to be ashamed of. And with dance music, the margin for error is even thinner - if dance music doesn't get you moving, even just in the frontal lobes, there's simply no way to discuss it honestly except as a failure. It's entirely possible that Daft Punk may never recover from Human After All in spite of it being, most likely, a perfectly fine mid-period record; I'm sure I'll check them out until the end of time simply because, well, Discovery, but now their albums are going to come stamped with a big scarlet A in my mind just to make sure I remember that the Daft Punk Thing isn't necessarily a swing-away situation now that I've heard how their music sounds with all the fun sucked out.

Needless to say, dance music got emasculated pretty quickly once two of its auteurs were held butt-ass nekkid up to the light. Imagine what would happen to the whole freak-folk scene if all the Animal Collective and Devendra Barnhardt crowds had to contend with the fact that the guys on the front of their standards suddenly turned fungible - odds are pretty good that you'd get something like the critical exodus away from dance music. Which is, of course, a perfectly reasonable reaction; I like explaining plenty of music more than I actually like listening to it, and more often than not all that stuff ends up back at Amoeba once everyone's heard my spiel. It's just that dance music, and this may turn out to be a pretty weak payoff for all this reading, is way more nakedly "product" than most other pop music, and consequently if you stay with it, there's every chance that you'll find the sound that's been missing from the inside of your head somewhere else if you look around for it.

As you can probably imagine, last night I woke the fuck up to Digitalism and MSTRKRFT in a big way. The internet, of course, had been pimping them both to me for months like you wouldn't believe - hell, I'd even downloaded songs of theirs before - but it took until last night for me to put them in the proper context, namely "Hey! These guys are using samplers to be rock stars!", and seeing as how that's the principle component of my attraction to Discovery, well, here we are. I mean, "Easy Love" is a pretty great little slab of electro-house-pop in and of itself, but give it to someone still coming to terms with "Digital Love" being a once-in-a-lifetime thing and it's practically shamanistic - even if it's not as perfect as one of the best songs ever, it lets you have the same kind of fun getting its vocoders out of your head or trying to place those synths or etc. And god almighty, "Zdarlight" - or at least this remix - is every bit as warm and appealing a classic house-banger as "Robot Rock" isn't - it's about as nakedly unsophisticated a song as you're likely to find short of digging diva house cuts off a Hed Kandi compilation, but comparing it to "Robot Rock" is like comparing "Louie Louie" to, I dunno, some boring old Robert Fripp bullshit.

I dunno. I really don't have much of a point beyond the fact that these are two awesome songs by two awesome production outfits that hit one specific spot that one specific group seems to have abandoned for dead, which isn't exactly a world-wreckingly audacious kind of suggestion. But at the end of the day, it's a pretty huge relief that I don't have to up and leave all that stuff for dead, that there are, in fact, people out there to pick up where the stuff I liked left off - if it's all the same to the world, I'd rather not play Discovery into a state of obsolescence for a few years. Maybe this is the new post-leak normal - maybe breaking new ground is child's play these days , and the good stuff is all the shit that makes you think about records you already own.

(Click here to buy a copy of "Zdarlight" (Moonlight version) from Juno)
(Click here to buy a copy of the "Easy Love" single from Last Gang Records)

ELSEWHERE:

- Today's post wouldn't be possible without the exceptionally high-quality stuff available at The Prettiest Pony - I'm pretty sure I managed to download everything they'd made available. If you like that MSTRKRFT track, make sure to check it out; right up top they've got a link to MSTRKRFT's unconscionably awesome remix of Services' "Element Of Danger", with a bunch more waiting down the page. Also, if you're looking for exceptionally gorgeous electro-y house, you CANNOT MISS the Linus Loves post - "VH1" is awesome, and the Mylo remix is good enough that I actually like a Mylo song.

Seriously, The Prettiest Pony is one of those sites that makes me kick myself out of envy, so definitely go check it out.

- Also I would be remiss if I didn't mention TAPE for all yr dubby disco needs - the Einmusik remix of The Shock's "Manhattan" above and beyond anything else, but yeah, that whole site's pretty much money in the bank.

- Also I'm sure we've all heard the predictably jaw-droppingly awesome Jacques Lu Cont remix of Coldplay's "Talk" by now, but if not, Digital Eargasm is yr hook-up.

- Oh, and Los Angelinos: Ambitious Outsiders may be dead, but fortunately we have Rock Insider and that's more than enough - as if the list of upcoming concerts wasn't invaluable on its own, Jax tends to post mp3s of bands set to play so that maybe, just maybe, you can act like you've got some sense in your head and not miss out on all the ridiculous shows that just sorta happen around here, like that time when you missed that one band playing with that other band in that club for that price. NOT THAT I'M BITTER.

- Finally, a belated congradulations to James over at Headphonesex for making it past the one-year mark, although anyone who's ever downloaded anything off his site knows damn well why it's stayed around. For instance, here's his recent post on Metronomy and their insane rulingness, all of which is true.