[Mute; 10/06/2009]
The “summer-beach-pop” discourse has been built up and proliferated with such force recently that it may take a while for most of us to realize how inexcusable it was to allow seasonal language to overshadow the caliber of the music itself. But when the sun says goodbye to the once-bright sky and the ice returns to haunt our hearts and turn our sidewalks into fucked-up, slippery, sloshed-out messes, the sounds of summer will, just like summer itself, fade away like all sunny-ephemera does. There will be frostburn and snot-icicles where there was once sunburn and sand-snot. There’s no way to prevent it. The winter-gloom shall return, and a mass exodus to California has already once proven to be nothing more than a quick stop on the way to yuppiedom. We can either spill tears into our Miami Vice beach towels, or we can face the frost and say, “Bring it on, motherfucker!” Henry Kissinger once said, “Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.” The discourse of summer-pop, like all flimsy structures, will one day be knocked to the ground in order to make room for new ones. “It ought to happen now,” says Kissinger.
Read the rest here.
The “summer-beach-pop” discourse has been built up and proliferated with such force recently that it may take a while for most of us to realize how inexcusable it was to allow seasonal language to overshadow the caliber of the music itself. But when the sun says goodbye to the once-bright sky and the ice returns to haunt our hearts and turn our sidewalks into fucked-up, slippery, sloshed-out messes, the sounds of summer will, just like summer itself, fade away like all sunny-ephemera does. There will be frostburn and snot-icicles where there was once sunburn and sand-snot. There’s no way to prevent it. The winter-gloom shall return, and a mass exodus to California has already once proven to be nothing more than a quick stop on the way to yuppiedom. We can either spill tears into our Miami Vice beach towels, or we can face the frost and say, “Bring it on, motherfucker!” Henry Kissinger once said, “Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.” The discourse of summer-pop, like all flimsy structures, will one day be knocked to the ground in order to make room for new ones. “It ought to happen now,” says Kissinger.
Read the rest here.
2 comments:
This record is a real departure, at least in the insular terms of shoegaze and 80s British psychedelia that APTBS operates within. Rather than the extremes of JMAC or Loveless MBV, APTBS refers back to 1986-88: pre-Loveless MBV, proto-gaze, post-new wave Brit acts like the Chameleons, and even some Spacemen as on "Ego Death." Although I agree that the band avoids the tag of being "derivative," what other sounds and textures will APTBS mine next? Is the band forcing itself to stretch the limits of what a very particular sound can achieve? I hope so.
I agree with what you're saying. The Pitchfork review was way off. I had a feeling that some would try to use that "boo, the band isn't noisy as they were before" shit, which is why I threw up that mention about the myth in my review. Exploding Head is noisy. But not that that's a reason to accept or dismiss the album on it's own. I think Exploding Head is stronger that the debut. The songs are tighter, and the production has improved their noise bursts rather than taken them away. I am curious about what they'll do next, like you are. If anyone is going to push guitar centric music to the next level it's gonna be these dudes (or somebody using Ackermann's effects pedals). Popmatters also put up a good review, I think, that focused on the humourous aspects of the album: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/110089-a-place-to-bury-strangers-exploding-head/ . But I don't think the writer gets it completely right, namely by picking up on the B-movie sorta humour that the band embraces, like when they made that video last year using footage from the sweet TV movie The Lathe of Heaven.
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