Regarding Stuff

Yaz, "Bring Your Love Down (Didn't I)" - I'm a recent convert (by which I mean "a matter of hours") to Yaz, a fact that will probably be (1) somewhat surprising to anyone who's ever heard me go on and on and on and etc. about "Only You", still one of the very very very best songs I've ever heard in my life (even if the Flying Picketts version makes a hole in the earth with it), and (2) utterly unsurprising to what I'd like to think would be most people sitting down with Upstairs At Eric's for the first time these days. It is, like most of Vince Clarke's projects, a massive display of virtuosity carried out on profoundly obsolete (or at the very least, no-longer-cutting-edge) technology, and as a result a lot of it comes off as only slightly more impressive than when your cousin showed you how to write "hell" on a calculator.

I bet you think that that's why I'm going to reccomend that everyone rush out and buy a copy of Upstairs At Eric's. Truth is, most of you can probably skip it; I wouldn't have given it a second thought myself if I hadn't been stricken by pangs of guilt derived from posessing a collection of music entirely devoid of "Only You". The bottom line, as far as I can tell, is that you won't hear anything on the album that doesn't come out in the singles: the ballads are pretty just like that and the dance numbers are all chintzy and metallic just like that and the cut-up conversation bits...well, okay, I guess those aren't in the singles, but those of you turning to Yaz records for your Terry Riley fixes probably need a good talking-to anyway.

AT ANY RATE. What I wanted to talk about, and why I'm posting this song which probably never sold a copy of Upstairs At Eric's in the history of that record, is that I did end up buying it, and it does sound good over a car stereo, and that there are a whole bunch of singles (okay, three or four) that I can see myself passing on to friends in the near future, and most crucially I still don't buy into its techno-chic. I find this shit fascinating mostly because I am typically the most gullible music consumer on the planet; rest assured that if you can make your record sound like a semi-compelling ethos, I will inevitably buy it, sing its praises on this website, and probably buy it again after I inevitably sell it back to Amoeba when I need some spare scratch for Fela Kuti reissues, and I will probably do all of this with a shit-eating grin on my face. All of this is, of course, totally normal; I doubt anyone would have bought that godawful Antony & the Johnsons album otherwise. But with Yaz, all I want to do is talk about their songs as, well, songs, in spite of the fact that cinema has already proven beyond the shadow of a doubt (hell, twice!) that they're responsible for at least a few songs that mean something simply by virtue of how they sound, or at the very least can support a meaning if one gets hung on them. This somehow feels profoundly inappropriate to me, although to be fair this may simply be yet another indication that I smoke too much pot.

Here's the thing that I'm hung up on, though: Upstairs At Eric's sounds really, really good coming out of my car's speakers. As someone who has predictable circumstances for consuming music, this was something of a surprise; I mean, I knew Yaz sounded great when I was sitting around my apartment playing Playstation basketball at the ass-crack of night, and I knew Yaz could sound great when blasting over my earphones at the gym, but the car is another environment entirely - I mean, I buy shit like Roxy Music and the Exploding Hearts for the car, largely because I know from experience that super-fey synthpop doesn't really hold up too well there. To hear stuff like "Don't Go" or "Bad Connection" or (principally) "Bring Your Love Down (Didn't I)" blasting out of my speakers and sounding shockingly appropriate was more than a little bit of a bugout - fuck, I wouldn't have been shopping for the album in the first place if I hadn't had some extra store credit from trading in (among other things) PopArt, the sprawling Pet Shop Boys best-of, largely because I was already sick of listening to it in the car and missing out on all the cool little flourishes (which just makes me think that I'd find Yaz less compelling if their album had the same kind of missable-in-the-car synthpop fireworxxx).

I dunno. This all kinda feels like navel-gazing to me; like I said up top, I've had this album for a matter of hours and therefore have absolutely nothing to say about its long-term values or blah blah blah. I'm not really sure who exactly I'm supposed to be selling this album to; I'm pretty sure that anyone with any interest in Upstairs At Eric's already has it (or else obviously doesn't have sufficient interest in it). I can say, however, that it's an eminantly more useful record than I ever would have expected, and that if you like this kind of pop (as opposed to this kind of music), passing on this record means possibly passing on one of those records you keep for a long, long, long time. Or you sell it back to the store and the cycle renews itself. Both seem equally appropriate to me right now. (Click here to buy Upstairs At Eric's from Amazon.com)

Milk Kan, "Bling Bling Baby" (clean version) - In contrast to Yaz' stately obsolescence, I thought I'd post this, the debut single from Milk Kan in an effort to show y'all what obsolescence sounds like right as it happens. I realize that that really makes this song sound a lot less tempting than it might be otherwise, but facts are facts, and if Dogs Die In Hot Cars can turn bad while seemingly still in the fridge, then etc. Naturally, this has nothing to do with the song itself, which is the kind of remarkably fun indie-jangle pop that would be monopolizing my stereo if it hadn't been doomed to arrive in the same parcel as the Guillemots' "Trains To Brazil" (which you have heard, right?); it's just that stuff this consciously quirky tends to settle into "one way to listen to this appropriately" really quickly, and inflexible pop music has a mighty short half-life. Oh well, I guess; "Bling Bling Baby" may be single-serving, but fuck it - quick carbs can do you good every so often, and I kinda like having a song where one of the most obvious (and least-ironically-proposed) strengths is that it makes me say "Hey, this makes me think about 'We Didn't Start The Fire' way less than I originally expected!" (Click here to buy the "Bling Bling Baby" single from Rough Trade, and be aware that the CD single only includes the clean version)

ELSEWHERE
- Believe me, I would have gladly rambled at great length about the Britney/DFA collaboration which surfaced a few days ago and which is currently still available from Said The Gramophone, but I am way too slow to be the first to jump on such a formidable and interesting artifact. It helps that the track itself is motherfucking shit-hot; I'd always expected that Britney/DFA would have come a lot closer to their space-disco do-yr-thing-in-large-form aesthetic, but as it turns out it's just ("just") a really, really great Neptunes-a-like track, the kind where you keep expecting Pusha to show up at any minute, and this is of course perfectly fine with me. Anyway, yet another thing to hope gets tacked onto the rumored Compilation #3, which may be the only record I'm looking forward to buying as eagerly as the White Rose Movement at the moment.