Real-Time Record Review: Lindstrom & Prins Thomas II

Subquestion: HOW MUCH DOES THE COVER ART OWN?!??!??!?

Lindstrom, "Grand Ideas" (Radio Edit by Prins Thomas) - Once or twice upon a time many moons ago, I hit upon the (completely original) idea to write a running diary for albums as I listened to them for the first time. It worked out pretty well for a while; I really thought the buzz was about to hit critical mass when the Foo Fighters booked me to open for their show at the Gibson Ampitheater, but like so many E! True Hollywood Stories the rock and/or roll lifestyle only ended up driving me to the needle. Consider this, then, to be my coffee-house open-mic-night comeback; I'm just gonna sit here with my acoustic guitar and caterwaul a bunch of couplets rhyming "smack" with "jack" and engaging in heart-stoppingly uncomfortable banter between songs and WAIT COME BACK I PROMISE TO START MAKING SENSE.

Anyway; this album came down a series of tubes a couple of days ago, and since for some inexcusable reason I haven't found the time to to listen to it yet (I choose to blame Waves at Night for coming through with all the goods at once. like, alllllll the goods), here we are. (The "Grand Ideas" remix, of course, has nothing to do with II; maybe this week's theme can be "Awesome-Yet-Tangential-At-Best Hype Machine Bait" [but this edit really is both awesome and a minor pain in the ass to track down, so git].)

1. Cisco

00:00: Since this is obviously going to to take a minute to ramp up, I'd like to start off by apologizing to my vast Scandinavian audience for my mangling of your fine language with these song titles;

00:45ish: WELL, I was wrong; all of a sudden this turned into some lost Fleetwood Mac dub track. It's not a surprising look for them or anything, of course; I'm just impressed by how much quicker they can flip that switch than, like, anyone. Let's all start a rumor that L&PT are producing Lindsay Buckingham's next album and hope it comes true.

03:01: Yeah, not that there should have been any doubt in your minds but I'm sold as shit on this already. I had just turned up my speakers to catch some of the background noodling when in come the big quicksilvery synths. Apparently they made this record to satisfy people whose brains function exactly like mine. I had no idea broke-ass recovering professional scumbags were such an alluring demographic.

05:15: Big weird psychedelic fading-in-and-out going on all over the place. Motherfucking love this so far.

07:00: Wow, that last big gated swell was a tease?!??! They could have gotten like another three minutes out of this motherfucker easily. Not that it sucks in any way as-is or anything, just damn, MOAR PLZ.

2. Rothaus

02:21: Case in point: it took me so long to try and cope w/ the fact that the opener had wrapped up that here we are two and a half minutes into the next song w/o anything needing to be said. To be fair, it's pretty noodly stuff so far; also let's pause to recognize the fact that I'm admitting to the whole internet that it took me three minutes to come up with a MOAR PLZ joke. But where's my parade?

02:44: OH WAIT HERE IT GOES. Okay, this just hit Must Check Out status for anyone who liked the DFA remix of "Rise".

04:20: WOO SMOKE HERB EVERYDAY YEAH WHAT. No, but seriously, this is where the drum fills start to get really tremendous, no mean feat for this song so far. Somewhere in the world, some enterprising young chap or she-chap is blending out of this and into "Get Innocuous" right now. And lo, it was good.

05:58: And there it goes building again. Let's just say that this is clearly one of those records that sounds like it came from a place where the fact that it's colder than a witch's tit for nine months out of the year gives people extra incentive to stay in and get their album just right.

07:29: Love that warm synth pad that just showed up. I believe the term I'm looking for is "Stevie-esque".

08:45: And after all that it just kinda peters out. Then again, after nine solid minutes, where the hell else was there for it to go?

3. For Ett Slikk Og Ingenting

00:30: THEEEEEEEEEE LOOOOOOOOOOVE BOOOOOOOAAAATTTTTTTT...

00:51: The psychedelic overtones of this record are painfully awesome. I absolutely cannot wait to listen to it on headphones.

03:23: There's some odd clicking around here which kind of throws the song off a little; I can't tell whether that's an actual fuckup on their part (unlikely) or due to the arduous en-steal-ulating process this album went through (promo copies apparently went out with the songs divided into 99 fragmentary tracks [so that folks could listen to the CD but have a hard time ripping it, you see]). Guess I'll have to wait until I get the vinyl to find out for sure.

05:47: Okay, congas getting all up in this piece are saving this track's ass from being kinda wanky. Definitely the most jam-oriented of the songs so far, and yet I still want to hear someone throw some Lou Rawls acapellas (god, please let these exist) on top.

08:45: Credit where it's due: the rebellious 80s arcade-game outro is kinda rad in its own right.

4. Rett Pa

00:35: OKAY THIS RULES ALREADY. Lindstrom and Prins Thomas may be better than anyone in the universe at coming up with kick drum sounds; they're just all-consuming and metronomic enough to get even the whitest of honkies up and going. You're just like, "How in the world did they - oh, right. Norway."

02:00: By the way, have I ever mentioned that I missed out on my only chance to see Prins Thomas in LA? Yeah, guess what I'm stewing over right now. (I also missed out on Lindstrom up in San Francisco a few weeks ago; that's of course a pretty formidable commute but LINDSTROM.)

03:39: Yeah, this is building into something motherfucking tremendous. Big-ass drum fills, an utterly beguiling tambourine, and crazy whooshing-ass sound effects all over the place.

05:14: No disrespect to Norway earlier, by the way; I can only dream of living in a place where stuff like this gets played in huge twelve-hour (no joke) blocks. JOAX BRUV.

5. Skal Vi Prove Naa

00:06: And here come the new-age synths. WHOOOO CANNNN SAYYYYYY...

01:00: Uh damn, this just sort of picks right up.

02:24: I'm not going to lie: I'm finding it kind of daunting dealing w/ the lyriclessness of the

05:45: Sorry, I had to set up a job interview for tomorrow. Anyone laying odds of me meeting 2 midgets at 2 interviews within a 1-week span?

06:57: Oh, and this track is kind of pretty good in an utterly-unremarkable-in-the-context-of-this-album kind of way; the most involving aspect of it is just trying to place which massive R&B melody line the book to this song bites (edit: apparently I'm not the only one w/ this problem). "Rothaus" FTW ATM. Y R U MVNG?

08:57: On the other hand, at least this song seems to be wrapping up in a familiar manner; it's pretty great hearing every stem of the song wrapping down one-by-one.

6. Gudene Vet and Snutt

02:35: God, this would be a summertime bar-be-cue anthem if dudes who grilled meat outside could only be convinced to listen to super-hipster disco noodling. I should make a tape of this with a label "Zep Instrumental Takes" and leave it lying around before my neighbors' next cookout.

05:39: Wow, it's going to be pretty interesting to see where this goes; in contrast to "Cisco" this feels pretty thoroughly worked-out by this point.

06:39: Whoa, was that a voice? After like 45 minutes of wordless silence, just the sound of a human voice is almost startling.

07:17: And so it goes all... kind of... acid-y Motown? I'm Ron Burgandy?

07:35: Nope, false alarm; the "Why Can't We Live Together" drums just came in. I suppose that's the "Snutt" part.

7. Note I Love You + 100

00:11: And in contrast to the opener's Fleetwood Mackitude, this one's all Carly Simon'ed up like you wouldn't believe. I ordinarily despise Carly Simon apart from "You're So Vain" but they're actually getting some mileage out of it here.

01:22: Seriously, is there some huge catalogue of vocal or acapella tracks from the seventies floating around somewhere? There's work to be done for enterprising young bootleggers here.

02:55: Uh okay, that part just happened.

03:51: Really liking that heavily-opiated guitar.

06:19: Wow, this song's really going to go all over the place. I mean it's eleven minutes long and everything (and it certainly hasn't gone anywhere bad yet), but it just kinda switches gears on you.

07:33: Oh shit, is this going to be the track on this album that just blows itself up in a blaze of glory? That'd sure be one hell of a trick; this song's been exploring the studio space for so long that I can barely remember how it started. I'm not even sure it's going to come together in some huge ecstatic tida wave or anything; this record's pleasures are very detail-oriented so far. But hey, we've got like four minutes left to find out.

09:25: And there's your answer: YEP.

10:10: Oh man, this is some hardcore chin-stroking wanky nonsense right here. It's also really really really good chin-strokoh I'm done with this joke. Basically this song is good.

11:15: Okay, unless this next track's a biblical Revelation I'm pretty sure we're good here. Holy hell, I cannot WAIT to hear it on headphones.

8. Flue Paa Veggen

01:05: Thirteen minutes? God, why didn't I make myself a sandwich before doing this?

01:54: I went through an abortive Miami soul/disco phase a couple of months back - let's just say that aside from George McCrae and a handful of singles it's more or less been evaluated correctly by history - so it's impossible for me not to hear "Why Can't We Live Together" with every occurrence of this album's synth-drum sound. Still, in the case of this song it's going hella crazy places so far.

03:35: How many producers are there in the world (well, the world of mainstream hipster dance music, anyway) whose longer songs always end up being their best ones? I mean, Lindstrom, Prins Thomas, Todd Terje, the DFA kids, Joakim, Pilooski... anyone? (Villalobos doesn't count; every time I hear "Enfants" I kind of keep waiting for him to pull the needle out of the groove and scream GOTCHA SUCKERS like Eddie Murphy at the end of Bowfinger. Uh, spoiler alert.)

06:03: Crazy panning organ like whoa. I can haz acid tabz?

07:16 Okay, this is definitely THE wanky jam of the album - again, it's saved by the dynamic duo's supernatural faculties with musical texture, but let's call a spade a spade here. It's sort of like if someone took the ideas behind George Harrison's post-Maharishi Beatles songs and turned them into a gentle, meandering thirteen-minute nu-disco epic.

09:50: OKAY THE CHOIR JUST COMPLETELY WON ME OVER. Time to start mixing this with the Flying Picketts' RIGHT NOW.

11:20: Wow, you could actually probably just overlay the entire song here. Oh man this is gonna sound like such ass when I spend like four minutes doing it haphazardly in MixMeister.

12:05: And thankfully it looks like they're letting the choir provide the period at the end of the sentence; we've reached the minute where it's all fading out. Great great great way to wrap it all up.

CONCLUSION
This is what we in the record-listening-to-and-then-verbally-evaluating-on-the-internet biz like to call a damn good little album. Both Where You Go I Go Too and Exodus make it look like a bag of hacky quick-cash-in crap, of course, but let's be reasonable; this is clearly an album which deseres to be picked apart like a loose thread, and I'm probably not doing it justice snarking all over it. I don't want to make it sound like my album of the year or anything (so far, that would either be Junior or Merriweather Post Pavillion - why yes, I am the most predictable man on the planet!); it simply strikes me as a thoroughly decent musical accompaniment to any hour you might be looking to soundtrack. Ask me again in six months once I've listened to it again over headphones a billion times; for an album I like a fair bit already, there's nowhere for it to go but up.

(II is due out on Eskimo Recordings on May 26th; if somebody wants to hook a brother up w/ a preorder link I'll throw it in here. In the meantime, click here to buy Where You Go I Go Too from Amazon.com if you don't have it already. Also, there's an allegedly dynamite extra track from the II sessions on Eskimo's MySpace right now; I haven't heard it because Flash 9 is being a butthead and refuses to load the player no matter how many times I reinstall it, but you should probably check it out if you're so inclined.)

I, Richardhead

You can partially thank this man for this blog's existence

Chungking, "Slow It Down" - It's possible, I suppose, that Richard X's near-total absence from the world of music in 2006 was as much an act of commentary as anything else. After all, the man's music is all but predicated on exploiting the tension inherent in the classic artist's dilemma of wanting to make something timeless in a medium which makes itself obsolete; could you really even blame the man for not being particularly motivated to participate in a period dominated by works which wear their own expiration dates like a badge of honor? I love Silent Shout and Someone To Drive You Home and Hell Hath No Fury like they popped out of my 'giner, but I'll be pretty surprised if I end up dusting any of them off to illustrate the virtues of pop music to James Jr. (presuming that my theoretical wife won't allow her first child to be named Life-Wrecking Accident Cobo) twenty years down the line; they're all records to which as much of my appreciation is due to the fact that I heard them when I was twenty-five and in the mood to howl about slinging kilos of coke as I drove home from work as to their, y'know, actual musical virtues. That's not to say that I was happy to see Mr. X take the year off, of course; the man's Back To Mine compilation was/is practically the Rosetta Stone for my capacity to enjoy modern pop music, and there's not a doubt in my mind that there had to have been at least one sickeningly awesome pop concoction stored away somewhere in his brain which Pusha could have slaughtered or which could have served as a magnificent starting point for rendering "We Share Our Mother's Health" into something even more arch and gloriously foreboding. Last year, however, we would have all seen it coming, and Richard X is nothing if not smart enough to recognize the value of the element of surprise when you're talking about pop music.

So maybe it shouldn't be too surprising to see his big return to form come courtesy of an outfit as anonymous - well, before now, anyway - as Chungking; after all, there's no way to see something coming if you don't even know who's bringing it to you. Ironically, Stay Up Forever, the album in which he played at least some role in producing, may be the most stereotypical Richard X project yet; given the huge, shameless cues Chungking take from artists like Goldfrapp and Annie who owe huge aesthetic debts to Mr. X, his appearance behind the boards really ought to be a mere formality. So maybe it's the sheer professionalism of Stay Up Forever that 's kept me coming back to it ever since Derek was all AHEM HEY JAMES a week or so ago - after all, by now I'm so intimately familiar with The Richard X Steez as applied to other artists that I simply wasn't prepared for how good it could sound in its purest, most undiluted form, namely an album anybody theoretically could enjoy but which only ever ends up being given a chance by the cool kids.

Of course, reading Stay Up Forever as that kind of text does tend to obfuscate the not-insignificant point that a lot of the songs on it kick an awful lot of ass. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea about the extent to which RX participated in its production, but I'd be perfectly happy to continue blithely assigning him total credit if only because it's completely digestible as a Richard X text. Naturally, some tracks have the man's sonic fingerprints all over them; part of the reason I keep coming back to "Slow It Down" lies in that signature shimmering moment of dissolution during the breakdown, a RX trademark directly traceable at least as far back as his remix of New Order's "Jetstream". But it's the fetishization of the computer which really gives Stay Up Forever's best moments their unique-in-07 oomph - after all, anyone could theoretically raid the same sound bank as Our Richard, but most of those folks probably wouldn't have the patience or the meticulous nature to multi-track the vocals to such vibrant effect when, in actuality, it's the interaction of all those layers of shrill little "Slowwwwww"s which I'd be mainlining right now if I could just figure out how to shoot up my iPod. Stay Up Forever may not be a great album on the whole, but at its best moments it unquestionably demonstrates the kind of celebratory attitude towards the dehumaniztion of music rarely found outside of records not produced by Vince Clarke, and that's absolutely something to be celebrated. I can think of no higher compliment to pay it than to describe it as a Yaz record with modern technological horsepower behind it, and even if there's not an "Only You" to be found in its running order, it's still unquestionably an accomplishment to be celebrated. As it stands, this is absolutely the most fun album overtly made with an audience outside the congregation in mind to surface yet this year, and unless that Annie album actually ends up surfacing (COME ON JESUS/ALLAH/BUDDHA/YHWH), any album seeking to displace it is looking at a precipitous uphill climb. (At the moment, Stay Up Forever isn't dated for release, but the first single "Love Is Here To Stay" [which is also v. excellent] is slated to be released digitally on April 30th and physically on May 7th; in the meantime, click here to visit their MySpace page to check out more songs.)

The Tamborines, "Sally O'Gannon" - Although my favorite of all contemporary boutique singles labels is/was/shall forever be Young & Lost Club, I have to admit that they've been slipping a little bit lately - or at least enough to allow Sonic Cathedral to get their foot in a door which had originally been like blocked off with tumped-over bookcases and shit. As it turns out, that Sarabeth Tucek song I posted last week was just the tip of the iceberg; Sonic Cathedral really does have wads and wads of this ruthlessly insistent psyche-derived guitar-pop, most recently the Tamborines' gem of a debut. The big hook, of course, is the song's sheer volume; "Sally O'Gannon" simply fills a room with sonic texture the way water fills a cup with wetness, especially when that super high-pitched post-chorus synth snarl snakes around, and especially when the song drops all pretenses of delivering any other modern pleasures towards its end. I love Y&LC like family, but they haven't set off a fireworks display of that caliber this year; fortunately it's such a satisfying display that I don't even feel guilty about saying that. (Click here to visit Sonic Cathedral's website to buy the "Sally O'Gannon" 7" directly from their web shop)

George McCrae, "I Get Lifted" (Tangoterje edit) - When one first starts listening to dance music, the distinction between terms like edits and remixes and versions and dubs and so forth can easily lead one to throw one's hands up and make regrettable statements to the effect of WHAT IS THIS, MUSICAL POKEMON? I'M DANCIN' HERE and so on. Over time, of course, this resistance falls away, if only out of sheer necessity; when you want to talk about someone completely remaking a track, you're looking for the specific term "remix", or when you want to talk about a song's spatiality being explored more fully, you're misspeaking if you use a term other than "dub". By these terms, "edit" is pretty self-explanatory; generally speaking it covers all manner of sins by which the essence of the original is preserved, only presented in more plentiful portions. Lord knows it covers Todd Terje's edit of George McCrae's magnificent "I Get Lifted", which manages to pull off the devastatingly streamlined trick of simply providing more of the good stuff from the original song (i.e. all of it - I don't even mind that Terje went with K.C.'s vocals instead of McCrae's ) without screwing up its rhythmic dynamic. As you can imagine, it's something of a triumph; elements which previously went unexplored in the original play out to maximum effect here, especially when we're talkin' about those debilitatingly warm synth pads which just I mean good lord- Terje could have stripped his edit down to just those pads and I'd still be posting it here today. (Click here to buy the "I Get Lifted" 12" used from a GEMM merchant)