Beautiful Freaks 2010-2020

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

Contents

Editorial

03

Fictions

05

Live

09

02

Politics

13

Selected Reviews

16-19

Criticism

21

Family & Friends

25

2010s Top 10

30-31

2010 - 2020

From the Editor.

Over the past years I have kept a running document called ‘Why I Listen to Music’

in which I have collected quotes about what music means to me. Here is a small

sample:

»»“We were singing along to every word of the songs that helped make us who we

are” - Lady Lamb the Beekeeper

»»“Words will fail me but music never will.” - Everett True

»»- “More music.”

- “More music. Always more music” [I don’t remember what this is from, but it

is true.]

»»“To do something with music is always beyond good and evil.” - my friend Rob

paraphrasing Nietzsche

»»“This music was rather like time frozen to become space.” - Hermann Hesse

»»“And it worked. Because this song took away the panic. And maybe in the end,

that’s all any of us are after with this music thing–it can take you from one

emotional place and instantly put you into another. It’s one of the many things

that makes music—which when you think about it is way more weirdly abstract

& immediate in how it communicates than just about any other art form—so

powerful. We’ll never agree on which music does that, but it’s the power that

makes us argue and shout and beg and laugh as we try to share it w/ people, to

turn our feelings into words.” - Scott Creney

»»“What was it that Rilke wrote? That music raised him out of himself, and never

returned him to where it had found him, but to a deeper place, somewhere in

the unfinished.” - Karl Ove Knausgaard

I look back at these lines years later and know exactly what they mean. I can’t say it

any better than them, but I’ve always hoped I could show it in my own writing.

You are reading a collection of music reviews posted on my blog, Beautiful Freaks,

between 2010 and 2020. These are not necessarily reviews of my favourite albums,

but simply my favourite reviews. They are divided in a few broad categories: Fictions,

Political, Live, Criticism and Family & Friends. The center-fold contains some

additional pieces that didn’t fit anywhere else.

In this decade I have written much less about music. But this magazine is not an

ending.

Caspar Jacobs

Beautiful Freaks

03

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

ALL REVIEWS AND

EDITORIALS WRITTEN

BY

CASPAR JACOBS

EXCEPT FOR

GEORGINA QUACH ON

Thanks to: Abel, Andreas, Aiden,

Everett True, Freddie, Freya, Georgina,

India, Judith, Kasper, Kim,

Laurie, Lee , Martha, Max, Radio

Patapoe, Rob, Ronan, Rowena,

Scott, Stephen, Zephyr, everyone

who has been a guest on our radio

show, everyone who has played

one of our gigs, and the Oxford

music scene.

THE ORIELLES

04

MARTHA DAVIES ON

PHOEBE BRIDGERS

A. ANDREAS ON

WILCO

MAX BASTOW ON

JENNY HVAL

ALL ILLUSTRATIONS IN THIS

MAGAZINE ARE THE WORK

OF A. ANDREAS, MY DAD. WE

HAVE USED HIS DESIGNS FOR

VARIOUS BF COMPILATIONS

OVER THE YEARS, SO IT ONLY

SEEMS FITTING TO USE THEM

FOR OUR MAGAZINE TOO. TO

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HIS

ART, GO TO NICTOGLOBE.COM

FREDDIE MARTIN ON

SPRING & AUTUMN

05

2010 - 2020

Fictions

Sometimes, an album is best reviewed in the form of a story: a short vignette into a different world,

with different rules and characters. This chapter contains three such reviews. Although the imagined

worlds seem different, they are in fact just like ours.

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

06

Terry Remember Terry

Remember Terry? He would sit at the local from when the

day job finished until closing time, sipping his pint, carefully

and carelessly. He stacks his glasses, swished around

the remaining liquid, touching every object on his table by

the window with the same curiosity. The same boredom.

Every night at twelve, he gets up from his bar stool. Get up

and dance. Seeing Terry dance is a sight the like of which

you would never have seen before – unless you had already

seen it before. It was madness and it was beautiful.

Remember Terry? Poor ol’ Terry. Always misunderstood,

his genius – though was it really genius or was it all just

luck? – never recognised. Always one step ahead, one step

behind, bent and out of step either way.

Remember Terry? I’ll describe him for you. Reasonably tall,

thin, dark half-long hair, an odd nose. He moved in a specific

way, as if his motions were a recording of him walking backwards

played in reverse, but somehow this way of moving

only added to his gentle appearance. He talked fast, mouth

overflowing with ideas, small ideas, just little suggestions

and imaginations, no philosophies. Yet his voice was calm,

it was indeed a pleasure to hear him speak, which he may

have been aware of. But then again, who can really claim

to know what was going on inside Terry’s mind.

Remember Terry? You can’t be sure if you really remember

him, either. Memories of Terry have this unusual quality, as

if they are video recordings that have unwittingly captured

a time traveller who’s just making a short stop here in 1979,

there in 2013. That’s the thing about Terry, though: it’s never

been clear if he was out of place, or if he was a product

of his time just as much as we were, but more enigmatic

and essential. Did we not understand Terry – do we still

not understand him – because he wasn’t of our time, either

literally or figuratively, or is the truth far simpler, namely

that we do not understand our own time, none of us except

for Terry. If the latter is true, then perhaps that’s why those

memories of Terry seem tainted: the further we drift away

from that time in which he lived and which lived through

him, the further we drift away from Terry himself, and the

more we lose our chance to ever unravel the mystery of that

singular man unashamedly dancing at 12 am in the local

pub, with eyes that I can’t help but describe as sad.

Remember Terry? I bet you don’t. Here’s another possibility:

maybe Terry never existed, or he is in fact multiple persons,

all embodied by the same character, like a musical group, a

foursome pop band or something that call themselves Terry,

as a joke, as an act of creation, as a remembrance of friend

past, a meaningless utterance. Because Terry is not elusive,

he’s right here, really, and yet he is slippery, always wearing

masks and other guises, always changing his expression. I

doubt I’ve ever seen the real Terry, but perhaps that’s all I’ve

ever seen. See, I don’t know, but well, describing a person,

that’s quite a task. Do you need to give a complete account,

the life and opinions of? Or is one memory enough? One

song? One Terry.

Remember Terry? You don’t need to. There’s still time to

go out and meet him. In fact, Terry’s just arrived, just now,

and he’s sitting at the table, waiting to tell his stories and

to hear yours. Go out and have a drink with him. And if

you’re lucky, you’ll see him dance.

July 7, 2017

2010 - 2020

Japenese breakfast Soft Sounds From another planet

This is a science fiction story, but not a usual one. There are no star-sized spaceships,

futuristic outfits, or colourful lasers that sound like synths slicing through

space. This is a story that could have happened here, on our own planet Earth – it’s

just that it didn’t. This story didn’t happen here, but a hundred million light years

away. That’s how it is in this universe of ours, with its countless planets in as many

galaxies, each brimming with the chance of life, playing out endless permutations

of possible ways things could have gone – and even though ‘countless’ and ‘endless’

here are used metaphorically, some of those possibilities eerily resemble the

possible planet we actually live on.

It’s a story, then, of love, relationships, family, death. Of driving alone on a deserted

highway, falling in love with a robot (remember: this isn’t happening on our planet,

but it could have done so easily), the destructiveness of men, of coming home.

It’s a familiar story, in a familiar setting, but – this very, very distant planet isn’t

all so familiar. So tell the same tale again, replay in your mind the tears, the heartbreak,

the friendships, the beginning and the end, except that now it is happening

on this very distant planet that is so strikingly similar to ours that you couldn’t

tell the difference. And now, what we have is not an age-old tale of love and death,

but a real science fiction story. Do you notice the differences? Do you see now that

when our heroine is driving alone along a highway, fast, the light that touches her

car is a wholly different light? Do you see that her love for a robot is no longer

surprising, since the endless sea of possibilities of space cannot surprise us at all

once we’ve surpassed the limits of our imagination? Do you see, too, that death

is a wholly different extra-terrestrial death, and love a different love? (Or, I can’t

help but wonder, are love and death, even there, the same?). And ask yourself: if,

tomorrow, you would wake up on that very, very distant planet, what would you

feel? Would you say: “I don’t know how it happened / Was it always this way, and

I just couldn’t see it?”

Of course, after a while the dissimilarities become visible, even though you’ll never

be able to put them into words. But doesn’t the water taste different, doesn’t the

colour red shine like gold, doesn’t every word that every person (?) utters sound

strange, like a dream? And that’s the point: for some reason, we fallible human

beings attach incredibly more importance to what happens on our floating spaceball

than on any other floating space-ball, wherever it may be, because we have

the illusion that whereas in space everything could happen, and therefore almost

everything does happen, in which case anything hardly matters, we have the illusion

that here on Earth the laws of nature and statistics do not hold, and that our

events and experiences are unique. And therefore, simply transporting an earthly

story to an imaginary fictional planet is a liberation. In other words, we are putting

things in perspective, albeit a galactical one.

And now that’s done – now you’ve all got the message, to the point of being obvious

– I will break the spell and reveal what you could have expected all along: these

soft sounds from another planet are not from another planet at all. It’s Japanese

Breakfast, or Michelle Zauner, who has made them, and this story has happened

here on earth after all: that human-robot love really was a bit grotesque, that

deserted highway indeed as lonely as it seemed, and the water and the light and

the voices weren’t extraordinary after all. But we have the great capacity to trick

ourselves through music and through words. So great, in fact, that when in the

end the phone rings and we return home, we still have the feeling that the earth

under our feet has started listening to us.

July 27, 2017

07

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

September 16, 2016

08

Nots says NO! to everything. We say YES! to Nots.

‘Entertain Me’ is a force of nature. It doesn’t care about you, or me, or any of

the other two-thousand people on the beach. It’s a scene from Max Max: a massive

truck relentlessly moving through the nuclear desert, with Meredith Lones

playing a flamethrower bass guitar and Alexandra Eastburn driving a motorcycle

the size of an organ, exhaust pipes fuming, circling and zigzagging, steering

through the chaos – or maybe they are the chaos?

But Nots are not the Empire, they are the unstoppable Imperator Furiosa. Even

better than Tom Hardy. Way harder. Like the tyrant’s ‘wives’, they’re tired of

being forced to be entertained, and more than tired of being forced to entertain.

If you watch television while listening to Nots, its cathode ray tube electron

gun will spontaneously combust.

Cosmetics are what politicians use to hide their nastiness. It’s ‘face-value’, but

the face is lying, the mouth is lying, the eyes are lying, and the television makeup

is making it up. But hotter than the stage lights, Nots’ eyes stare you right

in the face… and melt it.

Nots carries a sledgehammer with them and wherever they go they smash mirrors,

leaving only blank reflections. Until the vanity of cosmetics is no more.

Nots hasn’t been tested on animals and side-effects may include cold

hands, dizziness and slight paranoia.

Nots is a negative force. ‘Inherently Low’. They respond to the news with vexation

and sarcasm. There are no answers, only problems: Donald Trump growing like

a grotesque hot air balloon, Assad’s and Saudi bombs turning Syria and Yemen

into a wasted landscape. Better let Natalie Hoffman scream. This is not a helpless

scream. It’s a critical scream. Political movements are borne out of being critical,

peering through the cosmetic. Nots is saying “This is not okay”.

Sometimes Nots has a determined shape, albeit asymmetrical and five-dimensional

and incomprehensible. Most of the time Nots is going somewhere, even if it’s

only the synth urging the others to hurry up, or the bass marching on its own,

not caring about the organ which is then lagging behind and then catching up,

running circles around the peloton. And sometimes Nots loses every trace of a

definite form, becoming a pulsating globule with spiky bits, an abhorrent object

you don’t dare look at. That’s when your family asks you to please turn it off.

Nots recently joined the Non-Aligned Movement.

All post-punk contains traces of the Cold War. The synth in ‘Cold Line’ engenders

that nuclear angst. However, not nuclear proliferation but global warming is

the defining issue of the 21st century. The scariest thing is that we’re not scared

to death. Nots are here to frighten us.

Nots themselves wouldn’t be scared - but maybe deep down they are.

09

2010 - 2020

Live

The fact about live music reviews is that you had to be there. Gigs are never so much about the

music as about an attempt to experience community. The three reviews in this chapter each illustrate

a certain disconnect between the individual and the communal.

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

SOMETHING GREAT: LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, PARADISO

10

Halfway through LCD Soundsystem’s set, around the

time they play ‘Movement’, I wonder what my expectations

were. Something Great. Witnessing a special moment in

time, the stuff of legends and tales. Something that wouldn’t

just serve to make my friends jealous, but also set me apart

from others – an event that would make me a different kind

of person, the way someone who ‘gets’ Twin Peaks is a different

kind of person. And there’s certainly an air of legend

in Paradiso, that night (the 11th of September, of all nights

– and of course they play ‘New York I Love You But You’re

Bringing Me Down’). It’s sold out, for starters, and after a

slight warm-up the crowd is going for it, they’re dancing like

they’re reliving their youth. Or rather, the overwhelmingly

male 30-somethings are re-living their youth. I was sixteen

when LCD Soundsystem played their ‘goodbye’ concert,

so This Is Happening is their only album I’ve consciously

experienced. But the men in Paradiso tonight, they’ve seen

it, they’ve been there, they were sixteen and Daft Punk

was playing at their house. And so on the one hand, LCD

Soundsystem’s reunion can’t be the same special moment

for me as it is for the people around me; but on the other

hand, seeing those people there, and seeing them respond

to James Murphy’s presence, that is part of the legend and

I am there to be part of it.

They were sixteen and Daft Punk was

playing at their house.

It takes a while for the band to warm up. While the first

half of the set has some highlights, such as ‘You Wanted a

Hit’, by the end of which Murphy is already hoarse, there

are also lulls, including the flat-falling opener ‘Yr City’s a

Sucker’ and, despite its popularity among the older crowd,

‘Movement’. But as the first blips of ‘Someone Great’ appear

from a carpet of synths (one of only a few breather moments

for Murphy and band), I know it’s going to get (even) better.

Afterwards Murphy announces that there will be four more

songs before the end of the main set, after which he will

take a bathroom break (setting controls to the heart of the

sun isn’t the only way they show their age). At this point the

fans know what’s to come, as we’ve still got ‘Dance Yrself

Clean’ and ‘All My Friends’, But first ‘American Dream’ and

‘Tonite’, songs from the new album which seamlessly fit in

with older ones. The material is simply that good, and despite

the years LCD Soundsystem haven’t changed much. It is

surprising, though, that only four of sixteen songs on the

setlist are off their new album. This is clearly a reunion tour;

it’s about giving the fans what they want. After the promised

bathroom break (the applause is loud and long), we get one

last new song, the elusive ‘Change Yr Mind’, and then it’s

all feet off the floor for ‘Dance Yrself Clean’. LCD

Soundsystem occupy an awkward position between

dance act and indie rock band, but now it becomes

abundantly clear they can do and even excel at both.

I expected this to be personal, but

instead it turned out to be communal.

And then: ‘All My Friends’. I always thought I would

be exhausted after hearing this live, knowing it would

be their last song, but instead I feel energised and

afterwards Kim and I go for a walk around our old

secondary school which is opposite Paradiso. Did I

really listen to LCD Soundsystem when I was sixteen,

when I didn’t even know Kim or when I just got to

know her? Perhaps, but it’s not what I associate them

with; my mind and music was elsewhere back then.

Instead, it’s my second year at university, the Rad

House, Rob, long nights of playing the best songs, and

the summer after that, when Rob was visiting me in

Amsterdam and we were sad and played ‘All My Friends’ at

3am on the balcony of my parents’ house. It’s been a classic

ever since. Just a week ago, I was dancing along to the song

with Kim at a silent disco at End of the Road festival. But

here, now, in Paradiso, opposite my old school, the song

doesn’t seem to be the highlight that it should be. I don’t

seem to be ‘in the moment’, as it were, even though I’ve taken

my single earplug out. Maybe it’s our unfortunate position

right next to the bar, behind a couple of tall Dutch guys.

Or maybe the fact that I know this is the end means that

I’m already done. In any case, the song feels like it’s over

too soon and suddenly I’m waiting on a chair by the toilets

in the basement for Kim and I hear someone exclaim to his

friend: “that was FUCKING awesome”.

And it was. It was great. With experienced bands like LCD

Soundsystem, things are always different. The lights are

brighter; the sounds are clearer, and louder. Seeing LCD

Soundsystem live wasn’t quite what I expected it to be,

but it wasn’t worse for it. I wanted to be part of a special

moment, and I got to be part of another equally special one.

I expected this to be personal, but instead it turned out to

be communal. Being there and not being there, being part

of it and being outside of it. Perhaps in ten years’ time I will

look back with a slight feeling of wonder. But now, the day

after, I look back only with a feeling of excitement. It was,

after all, something great.

September 13, 2017

2010 - 2020

November 19, 2018

Tonight is about chance. And about

community, and a sense of belonging.

When it turns evening here in New

York, my friends and family trans the

Atlantic are nearly sleeping, and so

these hours feel like stolen secrets; they

are private hours, time which borders

on the non-existent.

But if I hadn’t met Artur, a French guy

sleeping in the same dorm, I would

not have known about tonight’s gig

at Our Wicked Lady, just around the

corner of our hostel in the industrial,

not-yet-gentrified Bushwick area of

Brooklyn. So this gig is a chance event,

and therefore all the more promising.

When we arrive – early, as the first band

hasn’t started yet, but still a good hour

after doors open – the crowd can be

counted on one hand. The first artist is

Cindy Cane, whose music is described

online, or so Artur tells me, as ‘coldwave’.

The acoustic songs with ghostly

distorted voice are far from any sort

of wave, however. The mismatch of

expectations and reality increases the

evening’s dream-likeness.

Gesserit are on next, and my favourite

on the bill. How to describe them? I

remember coming up with a range of

Various Artists Our Wicked Lady, Bushwick, NYC

comparisons, but cannot recall any of

them. Slowdive, perhaps. I don’t care,

because I am mystified by lead singer

Elizabeth’s bird-like movements, now

spreading out her arms like wings

(Slowdive’s music is always falling,

but Gesserit’s songs are always rising),

then crouching down, landing and yet

somehow distancing herself from the

crowd, who are now standing in small

groups with their backs to the bar.

Elizabeth’s voice is amazing; I tell her

so after her set. We talk a little, and I

meet some of the others. As it turns out,

most people here know each other, and

live in the same area. There is a friendly

sense of community.

Elizabeth shows me her band’s Bandcamp

page, but warns me that the stuff

on there is quite different. It is true:

the online tracks are stripped-down,

sparser yet recognisable. This is another

element of chance: the music I heard

tonight exists only in that space of

adventures. Tonight, chance makes me

cherish what I have heard all the more.

Vamonos! are a duo that plays fast and

loud. The Ramones are a rather obvious

reference point. It is too loud for my

pop sensibilities, though, so I am glad

they play fast. Coco Verde come closer

to the indie pop I prefer, sounding

like a combination of The Beatles and

Guided By Voices. The band’s energy

is infectious, and I find myself bouncing

along with the crowd, temporarily

having lost sight of Artur. Lead singer

Julian Anderson’s endless energy notwithstanding,

it is the song sung by

keyboardist Koko Susa Williams that I

find most beautiful. Coco Verde finish

up their main set soon after that, but

are convinced by chants of ‘one more

song!’ During their encore, Elizabeth

spontaneously grabs a spare microphone

to add her unique voice to the

mix. Do I need to remind you that

tonight is about community?

About community, and about a sense

of belonging. But it is impossible to

belong to a community to which

you obviously don’t belong, despite

its friendliness. I don’t feel a sense of

belonging, although I do feel a desire to

belong. Mind, this is not a complaint.

I leave without saying goodbye to anyone,

and this I regret. Yet, the previously

vacant night-time has been coloured

in with music and people, which form

their own community of memories.

And these memories do belong to me.

11

12

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

▼ This review was first published in the

January 2017 issue of Nightshift Magazine

13

2010 - 2020

Politics

Often, music is at its most political when it is closest to everyday life: supermarkets, sunburns,

sleeper trains. These pieces are not manifestoes, but reflections on the political in the personal.

They are part of a quiet revolution.

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

EMPEROR X OVERSLEEPERS INTERNATIONAL

A Great European Record

14

Oversleepers International is a Record of Big Ideas. We’re

only two songs in and Schopenhauer and Hegel have already

made an appearance. Chad Matheny must be well aware

of the importance of their ideas: ‘Wasted on the Senate

Floor’ is an intense album opener, spewing one intelectually

compressed sentence after another. The ‘whoo!’s are ecstatic

and careless and the accordion resembles a circus with

one of those revolving décors that make it feel as if you’re

on a trip around the world. With Emperor X we meet one

important historical figure after the other while spanning

multiple countries. Jules Verne never gets mentioned, but

it’s his spirit of adventure and discovery that is prominently

present on Oversleepers International.

Oversleepers International is, despite Emperor X’s being from

the States, a distinctly European album. Apart from ‘Wasted

on the Senate Floor’, which, as the title suggests, opens the

album in media res right in Washington, D.C, the setting is

the Continent. Already on the second track, Schopenhauer

flies back from New York’ JFK to Berlin’s Tegel (rhymes

with: Hegel). Very much like Matheny himself, in fact, who

has also moved to Berlin to record Oversleepers International.

It is tempting to compare Emperor X to late 70s David

Bowie, who with Low and Heroes wrote a soundtrack for

the Europe of his time. It’s the kind of perspective only an

outsider can provide.

The essence of present-day Europe is movement and migration.

Oversleepers International features a plethora of visa

applications, border-crossings and embassy bureaucracy. On

the one hand there is migration within Europe, the freedom

of movement the European Union prides itself on. ‘Oversleepers

International’, for example, takes us on an overnight

sleeper train from Poland to Ukraine. Or take ‘Low Orbit

Ion Cannon’, which is named after a digital application used

mainly in hacking, but which also reminds me of CERN,

another one of those Big European Projects that spans multiple

countries, has scientists

from all over the

world working together

and costs a lot of

publicly-funded money

without having any

direct practical applications.

It’s the kind of

international scientific

collaboration that’s as

much of an ideal as

freedom of movement.

Of course, not every European ‘project’ is. The other side of

the medal of freedom of movement is the Frontex border and

Europe’s inhumane treatment of refugees and non-European

migrants. Those Syrian refugees are present on Oversleepers

International too. On ‘30,000 Euroes’, the most disarmingly

beautiful track on the album, Matheny is standing at the

Syrian border. It’s an ironic reversal of which he must be well

aware: the Western migrant who has successfully moved to

Berlin finds himself at the edge of a civil war that is indirectly

ushering in the end of the EU. “They deserve the same!”,

Matheny angrily shouts. The relation between Europe and

the rest of the world returns on ‘God Save Coastal Dorset’,

which is set in England, an island that even before Brexit has

always been split between the Continent and the USA. The

title aptly references the Kinks’ portrayal of Little England:

“God save strawberry jam in all its different varieties”. When

Matheny solemnly sings “Remain”, we already know they

didn’t. In that sense, Brexit also is a Big European Project.

Emperor X is undoubtedly an intellectual project, full of

only half-comprehensible sentences and tonnes of references,

locations and dates. But it’s not the work of someone

who wants to show off. The mind at work here is one which

remembers, associates and imagines. That’s how Schopenhauer

can end up getting drunk at a karaoke bar; that’s how

Matheny can stand safely at the Syrian border. Oversleepers

International contains, as far as I can tell, equal amounts

fact and fiction and as such is as much story as textbook.

It’s a mistake to think of it as pretentious – it’s closer to

playing pretend.

So, what is Oversleepers International? Is it a Great European

Record, the Heroes of our time, placing itself firmly

against a rich historical context but also recognisable as the

work of a unique mind? Or should we see it as a swansong;

the obituary of a Union that perhaps never was; an ode to the

disappearing night train; an exploration of free movement

and its limits? Or, perhaps

more than anything,

a wish, an Ideal

(remember Hegel)? As

Matheny sings: “We

dream / We connect /

In communion”.

May 9, 2017

2010 - 2020

OUGHT MORE THAN ANY

OTHER DAY

‘Ought’. It’s a small word which bears a

large meaning. It has a sense of obligation

or even necessity. But what is more

important is how ‘ought’ is opposed to

‘is’. Something that ought to be is not

the case, an imperfection that derives its

sorrow from the fact that it was meant

to be different. It could, for example, be

the subject of a student strike against

austerity and neo-liberalism, Printemps

d’Erable in Quebec, 2012: the occasion

on which Ought, the band, was formed.

It’s no wonder, then, that More Than

Any Other Day contains so much anger

and despair. In the title track, ‘Today

More Than Any Other Day’, Tim Darcy

sighs, and then chants, and then shouts:

“We’re sinking deeper.” He goes on to

exclaim: “Today, more than any other day,

I am excited to feel the milk of human

kindness / And today, more than any other

day, I am excited to go grocery shopping

/ And today, more than any other

day, I am prepared to make the decision

between 2% and whole milk / And today,

more than any other day, I’ll look into the

eyes of the old man crossing me at the

train station and say: ‘Hey, everything’s

gonna be okay!’”

Some of my fellow music critics have

interpreted these lines as a sign of genuine

euphory, a true lust for life. But all

I hear is sarcasm; a furious exclamation

of defeat against the world. The absurd

world that forces you to make the absurd

choice between 2% and whole milk. The

only thing we can do in the face of that

is laugh and sing, as Darcy does, a wryly

forced pop song: ‘na na na-na na na na-na

na-na’. It Ought to be different, but it isn’t.

Darcy’s declamation on ‘Habit’ comes

close to David Byrne. “Oh, there is something,

something you believe in / And

you can’t wait for it to take a way a bit of

time / In a nonspecific party, in a nonspecific

city / Or anywhere”. According

to one anecdote, Byrne called one of the

Talking Heads’ albums More Songs About

Buildings and Food after he got accused of

singing about mundane objects instead of

writing love songs. Ought are often just

as abstract, and indeed ‘nonspecific’. But

that’s a natural response to their disillusionment

with modernity.

But the same song also draws from

The Velvet Underground. Its mesmerising

coda is as much a sign that the song

is about heroin as lines such as: “And you

get it, get it in your bloodstream”. But if

‘habit’ is a metaphor for heroin, then heroin

is a metaphor for our habits, whether

that’s our preferred choice of milk or

pervasive neoliberalism. Again, there is

despair. As Darcy says it: “And you give

in again / Your limitations”. It’s about

our limitations as habits, and our habits

as limitations, and most of all about

the discrepancy between habits – rituals

that ought to be without reasons – and

limitations – borders that ought not lie

where they do.

More Than Any Other Day is a record

both political, personal and philosophical.

It rejects the world we live in, but despairs

at the absence of choice. It struggles with

the absurd, and wonders whether we can

divorce ought from is. It’s an album as

raw as the world itself.

May 5, 2014

15

MARTHA BLISTERS IN THE PIT

OF MY HEART

I fell in love with Martha because she

had sunburnt shoulders, just like my

girlfriend.

Their downbeat admission that “the

autumn forecast’s looking dismal

again” somehow proved irresistible, and

when ‘Ice Cream and Sunscreen’ suddenly

sped up, my heart did the same,

singing along to all the band members

of Martha in unison: “I was watching

the skin peeling of your sunburnt shoulders,

I know / I know you only melt in

the middle like ice cream and sunscreen

/ Blisters in the pit of my heart, blisters

in the pit of my heart”.

Martha come from a town called Pity

Me, which looks exactly like you would

think: uniform small houses everywhere,

small patches of grass, cars parked in

front of garages. Their county, Durham,

voted Leave. Somehow, Martha are

known as a political band, embracing

anarchism and DIY principles. But if

their music is political, then so are most

songs by Belle & Sebastian: stories of

boys loving boys or girls loving girls,

of smart kids at school getting bullied,

of the dismal jobs people have or the

mental health problems facing them, of

simply going to the supermarket, those

stories both reflect and shape our collective

(and therefore political) world.

Supermarkets are more important

than you’d think. They’re the dividing

lines of society, because whether

you shop at Tesco, Waitrose or Lidl

says everything. Some of the greatest

punk classics are about supermarkets:

The Slits’ ‘Shoplifting‘, The Clash’s

‘Lost in the Supermarket‘, The Raincoats’

‘Fairytale in the Supermarket‘.

And let’s not forget about those opening

lines of ‘Common People’: “I took

her to a supermarket, I don’t know why

but I had to start it somewhere – so it

started there”. Add Martha’s own song

about supermarket romance, ‘Precarious

(Supermarket Song)’, to that list.

Besides portraying precarious life in an

austerity economy, under the pressure

of workplace harassment and crippling

uncertainty, it also contains the funniest

pick-up line of these times: “I’m an

unexpected item / In your bagging area”.

Blisters in the Pit of My Heart is overflowing

with such tales of what society

deems ‘misfits’. The woman in ‘Do

Whatever’ who is “too polite” at work

– undoubtedly because if she wasn’t, she

would be called bossy; ‘The Awkward

Ones’, who “were the ones who always

felt awkward, socially cornered / And

I still feel the same / Still dreading the

laughter, like what does it matter? / It’s

not what I’m after anyway.” But their

music isn’t miserable. Somehow there is

comfort in a line like “But it’s not like

we all have to fall in love / Just think of

it like it’s a sleepover club”. Martha sing

about love as a necessary pact against life,

a survival strategy without which one

cannot live. And there’s truth in that.

July 2018, 2016

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

Porridge Radio

Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers

When I write about Porridge Radio I want to talk about

anything but their music. I’d rather ramble about existentialism

and The Brothers Karamazov. I want to mention

Neutral Milk Hotel (“how strange it is to be anything

at all”), Belle & Sebastian (“it takes more than milk to

get rid of the taste”) and The Marine Girls (“mariiiine

giiirls”), all of which Porridge Radio remind me of. I

want to write down a stream of consciousness of what

I’m thinking without paragraphs or punctuation. I want

to list all the foods mentioned in Porridge Radio’s music,

including ‘orange juice, biscuits’ which are their sole interests

on Facebook.

But not the music. It’s too confusing. (See, now I’m writing

about the music all the same. Shit). Rice, Pasta

and Other Fillers is a storm of anger, fear, wonder and

16

Hop Along

Painted Shut

I listen to ‘Waitress’ and my sister walks into the living

room - she asks me to turn it off because “this is not

singing”. But my mother chimes in, saying that if it’s not

singing, then it is playing. Frances Quinlan is playing

with her voice. Of course my mother is right. How can

she not be: she raised me on PJ and Kate.

Frances Quinlan is playing, stretching her voice, testing

the possibilities. Like an inverse Ariel, she sounds as curious

as if she has just discovered she has a voice in the first

place. Hop Along communicate how wonderful that is,

having a voice. Both in a literal and in a metaphorical

sense. Not everyone is born with a voice and many have

to fight for it. Music is a way of liberation, an act of creation.

Frances’ got every reason to make her voice heard

and there is plenty to tell; plenty stories of a society that

Blue House

Suppose

What’s the deal with indie kids (us, indie kids) and

their – our – bittersweet songs? That specific kind of

melancholy, preferably wrapped in an innocent pop

tune – you probably know what I mean. Surely, not

all Belle & Sebastian fans are depressed or in love. Demographically,

the white middle class guys listening

to Twee as Fuck certainly are supposed to have it easier

than most. The Lord Anthonys, Painter Janes and

String Bean Jeans of the world undoubtedly exist, but

they’d hardly constitute a fanbase.

And yet… It’s not loneliness necessarily, but there is a

certain tendency towards seriousness, a detached outlook

on life, like perpetually watching yourself from

the outside. A love for contemplating alternate reali-

2010 - 2020

“wasn’t even built with most people in mind”. Stories

about mortified waitresses and powerful men.

And if you keep exploring what’s possible, you’ll eventually

reach a border. As Frances says in our interview with

her: “I’m just doing my best with what I have, you’re

sort of stuck with your own voice. My voice frustrates

me endlessly. It’s a tool with many limitations.” You

can often hear her struggling, aiming to surpass these

limitations. Hop Along’s music is both adventurous and

admirable.

May 4, 2015

ties: escaping into old novels read on a rainy day, getting

lost in music. Discovering the misplaced realities.

The simplicity of childhood, the adventures of falling

in love, the counterfactuals. If there’s any essence in

enjoying these songs it’s not taking things as they

come, but as they could have been.

Blue House then are doing exactly that: suggesting.

The album title Suppose says as much: these songs deal

in the unrealised chances to be found at the crossroads

of life. A universe is sketched within the first

few words: “Then you stole my PlayStation games,

sold them on for pocket change”. These words hint at

a childhood and a friendship (“Aren’t you a friend?”)

larger than a single song can contain. Other times, the

mere melodies do the suggesting through juxtaposing

wistful tunes with a sadness in the vocals. On ‘Ear to

the Door’, James Howard sings “I know how it feels

to want to be alone”, and note the difference between

wanting to be alone and simply feeling alone. Again,

only the former is a supposition, a longing, an unrealised

possibility.

Suppose is a record – simple, soft, understated – that

you could easily miss, but as it turns out every track

has its own secrets worth revealing. While Blue House

doesn’t yet reach the levels of the indie pop classics,

their fusion of fine melodies and an autumnal sound

is well worth your time.

September 29, 2016

17

acceptance, and it makes me want to stay in my room

for the rest of the day. It’s a gaze into the abyss: life’s

meaningless so you might as well. It is an assault from the

first minute, when Dana Margolin shouts with visceral

emotion and accompanied by rolling drums: “The first

thing I can do when I wake up in the morning on any

given day is say hello! I am alive! / but I do not do this /

I stumble out of bed confused and upset that the world

exists / and so do I!”. It’s a wonderful mess of feelings

and responses, a bedroom record too large for the bed

– and among the very best things I’ve heard since I’ve

been alive.

If I were to write about Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers –

but I’m not! I’m not! – I would write about my favourite

track. ‘Sorry’ ends with a terrifying primal scream. That

‘oooooh’ comes at the end of a song about depression

and giving up (“I’m sorry oh I’m sorry, but I tried”), but

it contains so much strength. This is the core paradox of

Porridge Radio: the push and pull between the paralysing

panic at an overwhelming world, and the liberating

anger this causes. It feels strangely empowering. In this

way the music reminds me of PJ Harvey’s early albums,

which oscillate between fascination and repulsion at her

body. In the same vein, Porridge Radio have described

their music as “songs about self loathing / songs about

self loving.

The last track on the album, ‘Eugh’, is quieter and

compellingly misleading. The Marine Girls surf-pop

guitar and ‘doo doo doo’ hum almost make it sound

cheery – but of course Dana is shouting “DON’T BE

A JERK!” and just imagine singing along to that, a little

bit louder and more desperate each time. Porridge Radio

understand repetition, the focus and un-focus of repetition,

the desire and the losing grip and the fixation of

repetition repetition repetition..

If Porridge Radio’s music were a plate of food – a bowl

of breakfast porridge, why not? – I would shove it down

your throat and laugh when it comes out your nose.

So there. Listen to this. Don’t say I haven’t warned you

about what it does to you. Then listen again.

August 29, 2016

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

Frozy

Lesser Pop

I am writing this review in a bit of a hurry, because I found

out that no one on earth has reviewed Frozy’s Lesser Pop yet.

No one! The fact that no one has written a review yet about

a piece of beauty in this world is simply unfair. Here I am,

setting the world right word by word.

And maybe I understand why the reviews aren’t rolling

in. Lesser Pop is so soft and gentle that anyone would be

afraid to touch it. Frozy is the shy kid in the class. The dew

drops clinging softly to the grass. It’s a song that only lasts 1

minute and 11 seconds. Or a children’s show that is ruined

if you ever watch it again. There is an absolute simplicity to

their music. Consider the lyrics to ‘Ferris Wheel’: “A Ferris

wheel takes you up in the air, now you’re back down on

the ground again.” Repeat and again, and indeed you get

that slightly dizzy feeling of going round in circles. This

could be a metaphor for every and any emotion, but I like

18

Vampire Weekend

Harmony Hall

What makes music magic is that it lifts you up from whichever

emotional place you’re at, and leaves you somewhere

entirely different when it touches down. What makes music

magic is that in the end you sometimes don’t know whether

that new place isn’t where you’ve been at for a while,

so all the song did was make you see. your surroundings

Thus music rarely gives clarity – and neither does magic,

of course.

Vampire Weekend’s new single ‘Harmony Hall’ reminds

me, first of all, of Vampire Weekend. Not much has changed

in those six years since Modern Vampires of the City. Back

then, Ezra Koenig sang: “As the air began to cool, and the

sun went down / My soul swooned, as I faintly heard the

sound / Of you spinning ‘Israelites’.” Now, Koenig’s voice

is clear as ever, and this winter I don’t need a sunset for my

soul to swoon as I faintly hear the sound of two spinning

Rattle

Rattle

There’s the old saying that ‘writing about music is like

dancing about architecture’, i.e. pointless. But as Robert

Christgau rightly retorts: “One of the many foolish

things about the fools who compare writing about music

to dancing about architecture is that dancing usually is

about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a

designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or

gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on

that space whether they mean to or not”.

But although dancing usually is about architecture, music

surely isn’t. For one, music moves in relation to time rather

than space, its building blocks being the beat, measure and

the sequence of a melody. Except for Rattle. Rattle, with

their double set of drums and sparse vocals, sound like

architecture. They are a kind of London brutalism with

more open space, or perhaps the sort of structure Howard

2010 - 2020

acoustic guitars.

‘Harmony Hall’ reminds me of the Eels, which is in some

ways where all of this started. It especially reminds me

of Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, which was a revelation

to me. Now, some might think of Eels as depressing

music, but I’ve never thought of it like that. For me, Eels

has always been something slightly magical: the blinking

lights, the strings and the sights, the colours bright. Eels

taught me that there’s always a way to play a song even

faster, that often it pays off to play life in hard mode and

forget the fall, and that there’s a beautiful corner in this

world for everyone.

I have never been a Beautiful Freak.

The piano solo of ‘Harmony Hall’ reminds me of Bach,

although it’s probably a riff on Pachelbel, who Vampire

Weekend have quoted before. I used to play Bach on the

organ, and the way music lifts you up is different when

you’re at the machine rather than behind the screen. It

allows you to lift the veil and play at being the magician.

Bach’s music brings us to a place of a particular perfection:

God as the Eternal Geometer, a world of universal truths.

‘Harmony Hall’ reminds me of all these moments, but

that’s not the point. Imagine you are traveling through a

time machine. A short while away are the myths of Ancient

Greece, or the inconceivable possibilities of the far future.

But the greatest secret of such a journey is something different:

it is the fact that you are literally traveling through

time! In the light of that marvel, the destination hardly

matters. And so it is with music. It is not where the music

brings us that matters – although there’s certainly an art

in picking the right destination for the right moment –

but that it takes us somewhere at all. It is the thrill of

the take-off and the relief of the landing, the pleasures of

speed and of taking it slow, which count more than the

eventual arrival. And just as it is impossible to describe the

magic of time travel without describing time travel itself,

so it is impossible to get at the magic of music without

getting into the music.

Or put it this way. How do you describe a magic trick?

By recounting what you saw happening. But the magic, of

course, lies exactly in what you didn’t see.

18 February, 2019

Roark from The Fountainhead had in mind. Certainly as

ruthlessly uncompromising. And I’m not the only one who

hears this. The ever-perceptive Lee Adcock over at Collapse

Board thinks of Lego blocks when listening to Rattle: “The

two women of Rattle seem to regard their rhythms like

pieces from a K’Nex kit; snap one here, another there,

now break this off, and now wa-la, they’ve turned a house

into a hovercraft.”

Indeed Rattle sounds like the act of building, constructing

– and at the same time deconstructing as well, as all

these songs are spacious and empty, like the blueprint of a

pop song. They take away the guitar and replace it with the

snare drum, the bass with the bass drum, the piano with

the cymbals, thus giving every component of their drum

kits the same importance the conventional instruments of a

band usually have. It’s minimalism in the most literal sense

that there is rarely anything superfluous present. As such, it

is daring in its honesty. Take ‘True Picture’, with its gentle

‘tu-da tu tu-da tu-da’, as if this is remotely catchy (it isn’t,

and yet it almost is). Where do they get the courage from

to pretend? Or, of course, ‘Stringer Bell’, the nervous single

they describe as their ‘cocktail song’. To reimagine The Great

Gatsby with this as its soundtrack requires an unequalled

sense of freedom.

Rattle is, in its own radical, twisted way, a gentle, inventive

and, dare I say it, catchy record, at least in the sense that it

makes me tap my foot. And the one thing I haven’t mentioned

yet is the infinite pleasure Rattle radiate, infinite

in the same way there are infinitely many ways of building

a Lego castle. If anything, this album isn’t ‘radical’ or

‘deconstructive’ or ‘minimalist’ (though it is all that too). It

is a game: building and playing with pieces, a Boom here,

a Click there, a Rattle elsewhere, and out of those pieces,

creating something new. While most bands only give us

the final product, Rattle show us the process, the creation,

the enjoyment.

August 21, 2016

19

to think it’s a literal description of something as simple as

a Ferris wheel.

Or take the song ‘Sea Air’. It’s just over a minute long and

instrumental until a single hardly audible line is sung. Or

consider the listing of months in ‘March Again’. The simple

questions Where are you? and Where could you be?. Frozy

takes that chaotic and frightening world of long words and

strange people and sad books and breaks it down into simple

coloured Lego bricks. The months of the year, a Ferris

wheel, a melody. There is so much solace in this.

The title Lesser Pop is not normative. Frozy’s pop is not

lesser than any other pop because they use fewer instruments

and elements to say the same thing. Frozy allows us

to imagine the possibility of childhood again, but there is

strength in their simplicity.

October 2, 2015

20

Boredom is essential to human nature. And this is the

age of boredom. There is, for girls and boys like Lana

del Rey, no struggle for life. Neither is there some romantic

philosophical idea that drives them; no protests

for freedom or an heroic search for knowledge. There is

“

Human life must be some kind of mistake. […] If life–the

craving for which is the very essence of our being–were

possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no

such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy

us in itself, and we should want for nothing.” – Schopenhahauerer,

On the Vanity of Existence

the artificial pleasure of reality TV, celebrity news and

parties. But those are boring, too. On Ultraviolence‘s

title track, Lana del Rey quotes The Crystals’ ‘He Hit

Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)’. As in A Clockwork Orange

(which is where the term ‘ultraviolence’ comes

from), boredom leads to violence. But it’s as less of a

crime and more of an escape from a dull world.

Lana del Rey is the embodiment of boredom in the

21st century. She does not, like Lorde, act against it.

Lana del Rey resignedly accepts the times we live in.

She puts on her red party dress again. On record, her

voice sounds bored, and the way she is in control of

her voice is almost robotic. The same with the music.

Ultraviolence is cool, distant. The album lacks distinctive

up-tempo melodies – ‘West Coast’ actually slows

down for the chorus. It is no wonder that Del Rey has

been attacked by some feminists: she does not describe

life as if she is under control (but men control her).

‘The Other Woman’, with its 50s sound, is the most

obvious example. But on ‘Sad Girl’, she sings: “Being a

mistress on the side / It might not appeal to fools like

you / We been around on the side / Wanna be somethin’

you would do.” And, just like on ‘Video Games’

and ‘Blue Jeans’, even when it’s not explicitly as ‘the

other woman’, her ever-changing boyfriend is central

in Lana’s lyrics. On ‘Brooklyn Baby’, she muses how

he plays guitar while she sings Lou Reed. “Well my

boyfriend’s in a band”, proudly.

But I don’t see Ultraviolence as an opinion piece. Lana

is not laying out a case for a way of life, she is simply

describing hers. At best, she confronts her listener with

the vanity of their existence.

But there is hope. Sometimes Del Rey opens a window

into her escapist vision. The spoken words “I love

you the first time / I love you the last time / Yo soy la

princesa, comprende mis white lines / Cause I’m your

jazz singer / And you’re my cult leader / I love you

forever / I love you forever” on ‘Ride’ have her to love

as a goal in inself. And on ‘Black Beauty’, she knows

something that her man doesn’t: “Life is beautiful but

you don’t have a clue.” Whether that’s true or not, it

is a powerful message you can believe in. When Lana

said in an interview that she wanted to die (words that

she later retracted), I do not think she meant it in the

most literal sense. In boredom, you do not live; you

exist. Death is more beautiful than that, but there is a

sense in which really living is to let your bored self die.

July 30, 2014

LANA DEL REY ULTRAVIOLENCE

EMA EXILE IN THE OUTER RING

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

The other day I was listening to EMA while writing about

Lana Del Rey: an interesting juxtaposition, to say the least.

EMA’s music is gritty, bleak, full of industrial noise and military

drones, unpleasant, while the darkest description one

could give of Lana Del Rey is that she seems uneasily content

with an empty life. But when you think about it you

can see the overlap, and the question arises: are

they really all that different? After all, both Lana

Del Rey and Erika M. Anderson offer, in their

own way, a ‘vision’ of America – a vision, furthermore,

that isn’t entirely positive. Both, too, seem

fond of the outcasts – the inhabitants of the Outer

Ring, in Anderson’s terminology; biker crews

and The Other Woman’s and failed film stars – and a certain

strand of nihilism runs through the songwriting of each.

On ‘I Wanna Destroy’, EMA sings “We’re arbitrary, we’re

temporary, we are the kids from the void” and while Lana

would never put it that way, the essence is the same. To use

the title of another track on Exile In The Outer Ring, both

are ‘33 Nihilistic and Female’.

It’s funny. EMA’s records sound so uncompromising,

so harsh, so full of rage and scepticism and nihilism and

self-destruction that you must absolutely brace yourself before

pressing play. But in an interview with The Quietus,

Anderson strikes an especially conciliatory tone. “All the

songs on this record were written before the US Presidential

election. I think that one of the things I was tapping into,

subconsciously, was a resentment of the ‘liberal coastal elite’

in America. […] I have a bit of that resentment.” That reconciliation

is what the Outer Ring signifies: the outer ring

of a city “where the people who are being forced out of the

cities, due to being economically disadvantaged, meet with

the people who have to leave the countryside in order to

get jobs.” The Outer Ring is “the place where the weird shit

goes down”, a vibrant meeting place of cultures. It is where,

perhaps, discourse is a little bit less polarised, understanding

a bit more mutual; a new birthplace of tolerance. So

when Anderson asks “What are we hoping for?” on ‘Down

and Out’ (despite the title the catchiest track on the record),

it’s a genuine question.

How to reconcile the empathy with the outer ring with the

intolerant sounds of Exile? The clue, I think, is to separate

personal from political. This record is not about Trump –

it was written before Trump, and it’ll be frightening years

after Trump, and perhaps Trump isn’t even that frightening,

ridiculous as he is. This is primarily a record by and about

Anderson. The outer ring may be where we can find new

hope, but it is also where she found a dark basement, “the

darkest place I could find”. The world we live in simply isn’t

beautiful.

That brings us to the Big Question: what happens in the

end? “See, God,” Anderson addresses on ‘I Wanna Destroy’,

“no gleaming, no proof”. And over the course of Exile

In the Outer Ring, the Lord pops up in a couple of places:

“I felt sure I would be judged / This is between me, God

and Satan” she speaks on ‘7 Years’, and “Now only God

can judge me” she sings on ‘Blood and Chalk’. Well, what

the fuck is He doing here? Is this the logical consequence

of nihilism, a (desperate) search for meaning? Or is this an

allusion to the religious red states Anderson grew up in?

Or else is this a personal reckoning, God merely existing in

Anderson’s (and in our) own heads? It’s these incongruous

references that puzzle me, because the hope that they offer

is of a twisted kind. I’m not sure how to place them; to be

honest, they frighten me. It’s an absurd joke indeed, that

what frightens me most in EMA’s songs is the presence of

some benevolent higher power. But that’s just the way it is.

August 29, 2017

21

2010 - 2020

Criticism

We criticise because we care. We poke fun at those who don’t take music seriously - or take it too

seriously. But don’t mistake this for a lack of respect. The worst music is that which we feel indifferent

about. There is no point to even write about such music.

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

22

February 1, 2017

Disclaimer: I am not very familiar with the work of Father

John Misty. I liked his ‘updated’ cover of ‘God’, although that’s

mostly due to Lennon. I listened to his previous album because

it was supposed to sound like Sufjan Stevens, but wasn’t

impressed and promptly forgot about it. His new songs seem

similarly unremarkable. In any case, this article is not a reflection

on his music but a response to an

essay acompanying his forthcoming album.

As such, I will write as clearly and precisely

as possible, instead of adopting the more

poetic review style. After all, this is politics,

and in politics we cannot afford more half-truths, vagaries

and confusion than we already have. Today, I won’t be a writer;

I will be a sniper: efficient, and ruthless.

Society is pointless. We are running in circles, committing

the same mistakes throughout history, “inventing

meaning where there is none”. Or that’s what Josh Tillman

wants us to believe. I reject this view. Society is deeply

flawed, but not pointless. Progress might not be linear,

but it surely is there. And meaning is indeed conjured out

of thin air and that is the most wonderful thing about

human existence.

Reflecting on the current (depressing) state of the world,

there are different analyses we can offer. We could say, for

example, that the rise of Trump is “garden-variety violent

white nationalism serving as a catch-all for any number of

paranoia-induced anti-fantasies foisted upon the poor and

uneducated precisely by the ideologues bent on manufacturing

voters who can be manipulated into voting against

their own interests by making good and sure they remain

poor and uneducated before cravenly blaming their problems

largely on people bearing distinctions like race, gender,

and sexuality so people forget everything that’s good

about the American experiment” (no, I don’t understand

half of that sentence either, so let’s summarise this view

as ‘Trump is a fascist’), or alternatively we can see it as

an “opportunity to wrench the country back from the

influence of hypocritical corporate tyrants” (here I have

spared you from another ill-formed sentence). To me, the

first option seems closer to the truth. In any case, Tillman

regards both views, and any other along such lines,

as flawed. The flaw is that they are too sophisticated. They

assume a certain degree of order in the world that makes it

fit for analysis in the first place, and according to Tillman,

“[t]he terrifying reality […] is [that] everything is chaos”

This seems to me wrong. Undoubtedly, human affairs are

a nearly unpredictable mess. The election of Trump is just

one example of that. We often get it wrong. But people do

act out of intention. We have goals and make plans and

do our best to reach those goals by what we believe are the

best means. This is true for you and me just as much as

for Trump. No one has little dice in their head that randomly

generate a decision for them. And in fact, Tillman

agrees with this. His explanation for the mess that we’re in

is that “[t]his is how we want it”. Now to me, that does

sound like a bare-bones explanation; a fuller explanation

would look at what exactly it is that we want, who ‘we’ are,

and what kind of general statements we can make about

these wants (such as: white people want to maintain their

power). I am a bit unclear what Tillman’s point exactly

is, then: is it that there is no explanation at all for what is

going on in the world? Or is it that the only explanation is

that “this is how we want it”, and that nothing more can

be said about it? Tillman appears to argue both points,

even though they are mutually exclusive. As the former

seems to me incoherent, I will focus on the latter.

No More Half-Truths: A Takedow

Firstly, we have to qualify who ‘we’ are: do we mean every

single human being, or a subgroup of people who are

in power? I find it wildly implausible that everyone desires

the current state of affairs. Certainly, those fleeing

life-threatening war in Syria who are being denied entry

to the United States do not ‘want’ this! Suggesting this is

not only wrong; it is insensitive to those people in need,

who are being (frankly) fucked over by not just Trump

but by inhumane humans worldwide. To argue his point,

Tillman asks us to consider what alternatives are available.

He claims that the only other option is that we’ll all be at

war with each other “until everyone is dead”. Either we all

agree that this is what we wanted, or we’ll have to off each

other. (Tillman would make a good dictator). He makes

it seem as if this is a choice we are facing, but it is not: we

are trying to give a description of the situation. On a purely

descriptive level, it does look like we are ‘at war’. Not

machine-gun-and-tank wars necessarily (although, sadly,

we’ve got those too), but a fight or social struggle nonetheless.

I attended a protest against Trump the other day and

saw hundreds of people joining this fight. The theory that

“this is what we want” is wholly inadequate to describe

this. Furthermore, even if we consider this as a choice –

do we want to fight or do we just shut our mouths and go

along? – I wholeheartedly support a call to arms.

Yes, let’s fight this injustice, as hard as we can.

Again, to suggest that complicity is the

better option is offensive to those who

cannot even make this choice, those

who have to fight for their lives.

Josh Tillman does have an argument

against the fight option; namely,

that progress is impossible or undesirable.

Impossible it certainly isn’t:

although Trump gives us all a major

1930s deja vu, I proffer that the situation

worldwide today is far better

than it was even decades ago.

Gay marriage, desegregration,

female empowerment – I

don’t want to sound too optimistic

about it ‘cause we’ve got a

long way to go, but to suggest that nothing

has happened is vile. It says to the LGBTQ

community, to women, to people of colour:

your progress, your well-being does not matter.

Such a suggestion could only come from

a very privileged person indeed.

Tillman also mentions that

the fight is necessarily

oppressive: “Is progress

possible? What does

it look like? […]

The destruction of

everyone who fails

2010 - 2020

to conform? That’s not it.” If this is so, let it be so. I don’t

care about taking power away from the powerful, if we

can give it to the oppressed. Tillman describes this in rather

apocalyptic terms as a ‘destruction’, but really this can

happen on quite a small scale. Progressive taxation, for

example, distributes money from rich to poor. The legalisation

of gay marriage is a (welcome) punch in the face

n of Father John Misty’s “Essay”

of homophobes. Maybe Tillman worries that this isn’t

‘real’ progress, that ‘real’ progress can only come about

by forming some kind of socialist superstate that sends

every Tory to the gulag. But such impatience only shows

Tillman’s lack of sympathy for those who are actually oppressed.

Finally, let us turn to Tillman’s proposed alternative: returning

to a natural state, in which our main worry is not

to be killed by a bear. (By the way, what is this obsession

of hipsters with nature and bears? See The Revenant. Is

their masculinity really that fragile? On a more worrying

note, this kind of distrust of society is exactly what

brought us Trump). I cannot for the life of me imagine

this would be a better kind of world. Neither do I think

someone who actually has to fight for their life – a homeless

person, someone facing starvation – would agree. Perhaps

progress for some comes at a cost for others, such

that while “we in the West” are benefiting, the poorer

parts of the world would have been better off in the natural

state. This is about the only sensible thing Tillman

says: it is a fantastic argument for our duty to those who

are less well off than we are. Instead, Tillman

chooses to remain neutral, stick his

head in the sand. He can afford it, but

countless people can’t. For Tillman, it

is easy to describe the benefits of a

progressive society as “sandwhiches

when we’re hungry [… and] airplanes

for when we want to go

somewhere”. But once again,

this merely reveals the position

of privilege he is coming from.

I haven’t been able to address

everything in Tillman’s essay,

including the pretentious little

story at the beginning – essentially

a very poor man’s

Kurt Vonnegut

– or the

common fallacy

that nature=good.

Instead,

let me

take

u p

o n e

other

grievance, not with Tillman this time, but with music

media such as Pitchfork (I know, it’s always Pitchfork, but

they just make such easy targets). Their headline for this

essay was “Here Is Father John Misty’s Incredibly Long,

Incredibly Awesome Explanation of What His New Album

Is About”. The news article contains no critical reflection

on the essay; it merely lists the contents, trying

to make the essay look as edgy and

interesting as possible (how else are

they gonna get those clicks?). But

isn’t this the exact thing we’ve constantly

been accusing the ‘real’ news

of in their coverage of Trump? Copying what he says,

without fact-checking or contextualising? Allowing his

ideas to spread through the nation unfiltered? We do bear

a responsibility when we’re in a position of power. Pitchfork

has got a massive platform, but they are unwilling to

use it to question the privilege of e.g. Josh Tillman. I am

certain my approach is not ideal either, but at least this

website is doing their best. We choose to fight.

(Also, 2,000 words isn’t that long – I can knock out two

of those in a night, especially if the standard is set so low.)

We have put up for too long with Arcade Fire. Arcade Fire has

become shit. There’s one thing worse than bands that are shit

and that’s bands that have become shit, bands that started out

as a pretentious but nice piece of quasi-authentic fast food but

have slowly descended through the ‘detoxed’ intestines and guts

of a juice-drinking hipster (who thinks with a kitsch superiority

that his guts are cleaner than ours, can’t recognise that shit’s shit

always) until they came out as brown foul shit. Though to be

fair, even before that they were shifty indecisive insecure sorry

Canadians who couldn’t even decide about the ‘The’ in front

of their band name. The Arcade Fire? The Arcade Shit. The

Shit Fire. The Shit. (But not in a good way, like, “Man, this

is the shit”. More like “Dude, this is shit”). Arcade Fire now

represent everything that’s wrong with hipsters: the arrogant

elitism of looking down on everything that’s pure and good,

either that or appriopriating it in a dishonest gesture of ‘interesting’

benelovence, which in fact only shows how much they

wallow in self-pity, and often both at the same time, promoting

a hypocritical faux-edginess; the insidious sexism; the beards

(Will Butler doesn’t have a beard. But he probably can’t grow

one). Arcade Fire is shit. If Arcade Fire is shit, then Everything

Now is shit’s shit, the worst of the worst of the worst, the waste

product of landfill, the parts of plastic they’re unable to recycle,

the weeds of a materialistic capitalism that don’t go away, that

if you flush ’em down the toilet they’ll end up in your drinking

water. Talking about capitalism: PITCHFORK. 5.6, seriously?

YOU CREATED THIS SHIT! That’s like, the American

government giving a 5.6 to the Iraq War. Like Shell slamming

global warming, or McDonalds panning obesity. Like looking

at your own shit and thinking, Well, that’s shitty, and then

thinking you’ve thought something profound and meaningful.

Arcade Fire is shit. I don’t even feel sad for the fact that they’ve

pretentiously written a pre-emptive negative review of their

own album which turns out to be more positive than anything

everyone else has written. They fail even at failing, then. In

fact, I laugh every time I think of it. How misguided, deluded

and gullible can you be? Funniest thing that has happened in

ages. Almost redeems the insult to music their album is.

23

Almost.

But an insult to music is the worst kind there is and I’ll never

forgive Arcade Fire. Arcade Fire is shit.

August 1, 2017

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

24

This week, Pitchfork released their

top 200 songs of the 70s. Supposedly,

this is the definitive, true ranking of

songs released between 1970 and 1979.

I mean, they’ve had over thirty years

to reflect on the decade, and it’s not

like music is some form of subjective

art which appreciation is in the eye of

the beholder, right? The guys (they’re

mostly guys sadly) at Pitchfork are able

to decide how good an album is with a

precision of one decimal number, so it’s

no surprise they can pull this off too.

Except they got it all wrong. For starters,

David Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars?’ is

not the best song of the 70s; that’s

‘Heroes’, which P4K gave a 6th place.

The numbers ‘1’ and ‘6’ don’t even look

that similar. I guess Pitchfork’s staff is

afraid ‘Heroes’ is too dated, something

they worry a surprising lot about given

this is a top 200 of songs that are

on average 40 years old. It’s not true

anyway: ‘Heroes’ is about the Berlin

wall, which fell in 1989 (a good decade

after he wrote the song), while ‘Life On

Mars?’ is about space, and when’s the

last time the moon has been on the telly

from up close? Oh, that’s right, 1969!

To really capture that 21st-century spirit,

Bowie should have asked “Is there

life on proxima beeeeee?” instead.

But no one cares about the top 10 anyway.

Everyone knows that it’s the places

below 100 that really matter. Those top

100 hits, they’re always the same songs,

whether it’s Pitchfork or my mother

doing the ranking. But the difference

between, say, being 167th and 181st

really matters. If the Pitchfork writers,

the absolute authorities on music from

before they were born, decide that there

are fourtien nobodies who wrote worse

songs in the 70s than you, that’s a real

honour. John Lennon, whose ‘Jealous

Guy’ just manages to capture a glorious

124th rather than a shameful 142nd,

can be relieved in his grave. Marianne

Faithfull befalls the dubious privilege

of topping the list, which, given the

reverse order, means she is the worst

of the best. It’s rather depressing that

the numbers 201, 203, and especially

the 222th best song of the 70s, which

is actually among my all-time favourite

songs of that decade, weren’t so lucky.

Maybe ‘Love Will Tear

Us Apart’ (1980) is really

the best song of the 70s.

But thanks to Pitchfork’s

massive fuck-up with

dates we’ll never know.

Even more tragic than these forgotten

songs that are literally off the charts is

the whole year of music that wrongfully

has been excluded from Pitchfork’s top

200 best songs of the 70s. I’m talking

about the year 1980. 1980?! Yes, 1980

was part of the 70s. As we all know,

the 21st century really began in 2001,

because there is no year zero. Similarly,

the last year of the 18th century was

1800. So by parity of reasoning, the

70s went from 1971 to 1980! (Or is it

1961 to 1970, just like the 20th century

being the 19-hundreds?). In any

case, this disqualifies songs like the

Velvet Underground’s ‘Sweet Jane’

(1970) from Pitchfork’s list and gives

us good reason to doubt every other

entry, even the number one. Maybe

‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (1980) is

really the best song of the 70s, instead

of the 7th best song of the 80s. But

thanks to P4K’s massive fuck-up with

dates we’ll never know.

There is good reason to think those

‘mistakes’ aren’t really mistakes, if you

get what I mean. I mean they’re made

on purpose. And the reason is: Levi’s.

I’m not saying those guys at Pitchfork

are wearing their jeans to tight, doing

all sorts of things to their bloodflow.

I’m talking about Levi’s sponsoring

Pitchfork’s best of. And corporate

involvement in science (science! look

at all those numbers) is a no-go. To

mention just a few examples: wasn’t

it Bruce Springsteen who infamously

wore Levi’s jeans on the cover of Born

in the USA? And sure enough, his song

‘Born to Run’ steals a 16th place in this

race of the titans, suspiciously high for

such a laughable attempt at something

subtler than embarrassing masculinity.

Or take Blondie, who are also in the top

20 at number 18, and I’m pretty sure

18 is also the exact number of Levi’s

jeans Debbie Harry owns. This simply

can’t be coincidence!

Final verdict: while this was a good

effort by Pitchfork, their 200 Best Songs

of the 70s won’t be a game-changer in

the ultimate ranking business. I would

say it’s the 1st Most Comprehensive 70s

‘Best Of’ List, the 0th Most Comprehensive

‘Best Of’ List of the 70s (as it

was published in a whole other decade),

the 28th Best Pitchfork ‘Best Of’ List

and the 93th Best ‘Best Of’ List overall.

(P.S. When I googled “Best of List”, it

asked if I didn’t mean “Best of Liszt”. I

agree that would’ve been better, so this

one goes out to the 1870s!)

August 26, 2016

25

2010 - 2020

Family & Friends

I couldn’t have done it alone. Music is a conversation. Thank you to everyone who has contributed

to Beautiful Freaks over the years in one way or another. This one’s for you.

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

The Orielles - Silver Dollar Moments

- by Georgina Quach

Youth is like a loose tooth, peeling mental collages of hometown gatherings, like film stills, bottle tops,

jangling in your pocket, intimate signatures scrawled in American high school yearbooks. That word

always makes me think of Thomas Sayers Ellis’ collection of poems The Maverick Room, a compendium

of funk neighbourhood lyrics bred from his experience growing up in Washington D.C,

brash rhythms which rupture monotony and the dullness of ‘yet another anthem’. It’s

‘Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop’ which best captures—or resonates with the beat

of—that sense of the perma-stability of adolescence, floating in and between years: “All

those / Liquid love affairs, / Blind swimmers / Trusting rumps. / We wiggled / Imagining

water”.

At once expressing a nostalgia for those late-night escapades but also a fervent spirit of

unapologetic protest, The Orielles’ latest release Silver Dollar Moments is a testament to

the sheer brilliance of the band’s sound and their transporting narratives.”‘We met Henry

at a house party a few years ago,” recalls Sid about the beginnings of the Halifax trio. “I

mean, it’s a bit lamer than that sounds. It was a friend of our parents, she was having a 40th

birthday party, and we went along, and Henry was there too, with his parents.” They’ve

been writing songs together ever since, Esme on bass and singing, Sidonie on drums,

Henry on guitar. Embracing those messy and exciting bends along the path of what we

might call ‘youth’, The Orielles have crafted a perfect fusion of sunshine indie pop on their

debut album. The songs themselves are brilliant collages of cinematic fragments, literature

and physiological details of domestic animals. “So many pop songs are about relationships

or growing up or whatever,” they say. “We wanted to write a few songs that make people

think, What the hell is that about?” That thoughtful process of drawing inspiration from

the world in composition is brought to the foreground on Silver Dollar Moments, with its

glorious patchwork of odes to film classics and influences pulled out from their sprawling

taste in music.

26

From the first ebullient chords on opening track ‘Mango’, The Orielles pull us into a mood

that’s high-energy, but still questioning and contemplative, slowing at points to evoke the

dream state reminiscent of Nicolas Winding-Refn’s film The Neon Demon (the music video

for ‘Let Your Dog Tooth Grow’ is a gorgeous visual display of this). Defiant of typical indie-pop logic,

it takes all kinds of turns, boppy rhythms, dreamy-arch harmonies, disco synth-pows and hyper-active

bongos, unsettling submerged voices and hidden stories. With all that and more, the album flows like

a fountain of indie pop, effortlessly fizzing through genres, flavours and eras. The second track on the

album, ‘Old Stuff, New Stuff’, is the first that stuns, setting the record’s infectious tone with its rolling

insistent bass in a way that conjures Ellis’s ‘Blind swimmers’—we’re plunged into an electric whirlpool

of sensations and we never want to leave.

But its perpetual flitting between genres and themes doesn’t let us do so, with the following tracks on

the album continuing our dizzying road trip through sonic space. ‘Let Your Dog Tooth Grow’ revels in

the psychedelic throes of a rapturous summer, shaking up shoegazey pop sounds and funk with guitar

riffs that throw us into the heart of a Brazilian carnival. The song draws its inspiration from Dogtooth,

a surreal and decadently dark film by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos about two teenage sisters whose

parents never let them leave the house. Esme’s angelic voice then enthrals in ‘Blue Suitcase (Disco Risk)’,

juxtaposed playfully with the bongos and retro ‘wah-wah’ pedal of a rampant generation; each experimental

layer of instrumentation bolsters the scene, adding dimension and teasing out thematic elements.

All the stories, sounds, and characters merge together to form an album that plays like a colourful collage

of youth: it doesn’t flow perfectly, but maybe that was never the point. If you look up a ‘Silver Dollar

Moment’, you’ll find that it means anything that’s unexpectedly brilliant. The Orielles are a quintessential

example here, offering in their debut a tantilising treasure trove of their wayward experiences of global

tours and festival sets, 3am drunken conversations, movie marathons and ‘liquid love affairs’.

“We played in Toronto, at this bar called the Silver Dollar Room”, explains Henry. “We’d been in Canada

for 36 hours, no sleep, we’d already played at 10, then we played a show at the Silver Dollar at 2am

and it was one of the best shows we’ve played. So a silver dollar moment became anything that’s good,

but unexpectedly.”

February 15, 2018

2010 - 2020

Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher

- by Martha Davies

Something growing, something dying; something rising, something falling: in her latest album Punisher,

25 year-old singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers grapples with contradiction. This record gathers momentum

from her 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps, and carves out a brooding, self-reflective space in which Bridgers

becomes a kind of millennial mouthpiece. If she sings about decay, there exists by the end a sense

of promise that bursts forth in spite of itself.

The album’s opener rises with quivering synth and swelling electric guitar. Its haunting energy

slowly spills over into the next track, ‘Garden Song’, where Bridgers’ whispered soprano vocals

sketch out painful nostalgia. She betrays a wavering admiration of time’s talent for slipping by:

“And when I grow up / I’m gonna look up from my phone and see my life / And it’s gonna be just

like / My recurring dream,” she predicts. Yet her dread is coloured with some kind of pleasantry,

some kind of hope. “The doctor put her hands over my liver,” she sings in the last verse, “She told

me my resentment’s getting smaller.” If this is a battle between pessimism and brightness, even this

most eerie of observations still sounds sunny, somehow.

In ‘Kyoto’, Bridgers leaps into 80s indie-pop, featuring steady drums and bouncing synth. The

ethereality of her vocals is replaced with a steadfastness that still feels a lot like longing. “I wanted

to see the world / Through your eyes until it happened,” she intones. “Then I changed my mind

/ Guess I lied.” Her self-reflection moves in circles among the song’s crashing symbols and

triumphant trumpet backing, and there is promise in this expression of sadness that itself rewrites

her feelings of futility. In the album’s title track, this buoyancy dwindles, welcoming a subdued,

earnest reflection on the life of Eliott Smith, Bridgers’ biggest musical influence. “What if I told

you I feel like I know you / But we never met?”, she whispers, creating a kind of diary inked in

digital harmonies. Cascades of mournful melody and electronic production ache with undisguised

uncertainty, providing a melancholy undertone to what lies ahead. The slow-plucked guitar and

juddering synth of ‘Halloween’ evokes a sense of feeling out for something in the dark – yet

Bridgers’ tender honesty flickers throughout.

The standout track ‘Chinese Satellite’ certainly smoulders with feeling, as Bridgers traces a line

between grand poeticism and candid reflections. “I‘ve been running around in circles / Pretending

to be myself,” she begins, and then, regarding the matter of touring, ponders,

“Why would somebody do this on purpose / When they could do something

else?” But the plagued artist does not over-inflate herself; there is a brutal

earnestness to Bridgers’ anguish. Drums bring grittiness to this track, but the

synth and strings shimmer above Bridgers’ soprano like the blinking lights she

wishes for: “Took a tour to see the stars / But they weren’t out tonight,” she

admits, “So I wished hard on a Chinese satellite.” She sings about feeling aimless,

but her music is anything but: even her most wistful anthems are swathed in

eloquence and a dedication to soulful, elevated production. “You pushed me

in / And now my feet can’t touch the bottom of you,” she sings in ‘Moon

Song’, a masterful display of metaphors gathered in passing harmonies and

breathy backing vocals, as banality becomes a springboard into profundity. “It’s

nautical themed,” she says of her birthday party, but aches, “You’re holding me

like water in your hands.”

27

For all of its heaviness, then, this album glitters with hope. Banjo and fiddle

arrangements lend the final tracks a particular momentum which erupts

from the closing song, ‘I Know the End’, in which Bridgers circles back to

the dichotomy of death and growth with which she grapples at the beginning.

“When I get back I’ll lay around / And I’ll get up and lay back down,” she sings,

straddling dejection and acceptance in a track buzzing with synth but mellowed

by soft guitar. As the record closes, Bridgers seems to be taking a leap, stepping

out into the possibility that she won’t fall: she promises not to “go down with

my hometown in a tornado / I’m gonna chase it.” Her optimism pours out

from crashing drums and cymbals and belted vocals: “We’re not alone / I’ll find

a new place to be from,” she decides.

Despite Bridgers’ fears that “the end is here,” this album does not fall away into

nothingness. It ends, in fact, with the rasped sounds of her own breathing, itself the only proof of survival,

of a future, that we really need – though the raw, tender brilliance of this album is most definitely a welcome

bonus.

August 6, 2020

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

28

What’s this album about, Jenny?

No!

What!?!

It’s about vampires.

Yeah

So opens ‘The Great Undressing’, the sixth song

on Jenny Hval’s Blood Bitch. You’d be forgiven for

responding in the same way Jenny’s friend does in

this skit, tongue-in-cheek describing it as ‘basic’. But

Hval has in fact crafted a dense and atmospheric record

that uses the pervasive vampire mythology to

construct a concept album that’s uncompromising

sonically just as much as politically – and anything

but basic.

First of all, its style is a wild mix of disparate influences,

with artists from Patti Smith to Aphex Twin

in this album’s lineage. Bare vocals, pained wails and

jump-cut field recordings are the uncanny building

blocks her vision builds on and draws from, allowing

it to have all the immediacy and presence that makes

good horror films effective. Its electronic pulse makes

for many a dance-inducing beat (;Female Vampire;

and ‘The Great Undressing’ both have a head-nodding

deep house vibe to them), but with enough unsettling

perturbations to remind you that all is not

well, and you should not forget it. The most distressing

song is ‘The Plague’, a collage of increasingly distraught

recordings. When I listened to it on the bus

the other day I turned the volume on my earphones

right down for fear that someone might overhear its

horrorscape and commit me to the ‘definitely nutty’

section of their mental repository of strangers. At

least, that’s what I’m telling myself – it’s also one of

the most genuinely unnerving songs I’ve heard in a

while and was really starting to creep me out. It’s no

surprise Hval started out as a vocalist in a gothic metal

band. Or perhaps it is, as her current ability to unnerve

seems to surpass many heavy metal theatrics by

tapping into a more instant fear, one that actualises

the much popularised but seldom respected mythos

of the occult.

JENNY HVAL BLOOD BITCH

Vampires, and to a lesser extent witches, the thematic

staples of this album, are fertile ground for Hval’s

areas of artistic interest. The vampire, from Lilith to

Dracula to Edward Cullen, has always had a heavily

sexual and gendered dimension (as has the witch!),

and so serves as a projection of social attitudes towards

gender and sexuality: just look at blood-sucking,

a mixing of bodily fluids with a penetrator over-

- by Max Bastow -

powering the penetrated; or the vampire’s methods,

which inevitably revolve around some form of more

or less overt seduction. Thus, stories involving vampires

frequently expose the sexist, patriarchal core of

society – Lilith’s initial crime was thinking herself

equal to man, for hell’s sake (with the added sexual

dimension of her “refusing to lie underneath Adam

during sex”). Hval, here as in her other work, sure

doesn’t shy away from overtly sexual content or from

challenging widespread patriarchal beliefs, so what

better lore to tap into?

I’d argue, in fact, that this mythology provides an anchor

onto which her beliefs and ideas are attached in

a more concrete way than ever before: her previous

coinage of ‘soft dick rock‘, for example, was never

described more usefully than as ‘anti-capitalist sexuality’;

it sure is an eyebrow-raising expression, but

it doesn’t really get me much further to connecting

with her ideals. “This blood bitch’s tale“, on the other

hand, allows an immediate point of ingress. And far

from tying her progressive feminism down in attaching

it to a traditionally chauvinistic folklore, it gives

it power in defining it by its very subversion of such

tales. Where Jenny might have been cautious about

wandering from abstraction in the past, it’s clear she

now sees it as necessary, with a choice sample of documentary

mastermind Adam Curtis’ short Oh Dearism

II (take 5 minutes to watch it!) explaining how in becoming

more confusing the world of politics and the

media becomes inaccessible to the average member of

public, and any opposition is neutralised by simply

avoiding definition: you can’t be opposed to a belief if

you don’t know what that belief is. Ironic, then, that

as Curtis picks the example of Vladislav Surkov to

show how politicians are assimilating the post-modern

confusion of the art world, Hval, an artist, moves

distinctly away from such disorienting concepts to a

more grounded philosophy – the sort one would once

have expected from politicians. Confusing!

You certainly won’t want to play it at

dinner parties or during sex.

Hval’s specific use of vampirism here seems to be as

a complex metapahor for the frustrations of being a

woman – a topic I admit I’m not best placed to speak

about, and which I hope female reviewers will touch

upon. Vampirism is something which is inflicted upon

Hval’s protagonist, and that creates sexual desires,

causes pain, and involves a lot of blood. A vampire/

woman ambiguity is maintained throughout, with a

notable passage from ‘Untamed Region’ (its title full

2010 - 2020

of connotations) seeing the vampire wake up with

blood in her bed, saying “Didn’t know it was time

yet / Or is it not mine?” Menstruation is culturally

linked to the misogynistic narrative of women being

‘untamed’ and unable to control their hormones, one

which is surprisingly tenacious: though we no longer

diagnose women with hysteria (after a 2000 year

strong tradition of doing so), the taboo around female

genitals and periods continues, as does PMS, despite

some evidence of it being a culture-bound syndrome

(the mood shifts seem largely to be a result not of biology

but of society, not that this makes them any less

real). In keeping the superstitious and sexist tales of

the past alive, Hval shows that whatever progress had

been made in gender equality, misguided patriarchal

views and their troubling importance in modern culture

are still here; and in talking so directly about the

taboo topics of menstruation or female sexuality, she

directly confronts the uneasy areas where this bias is

most visible. If the album is often uncomfortable to

listen to – in the words of my mum: “anything but

easy listening” – it’s because it is protesting the inconspicuous

place these sexist norms have, made palatable

in great part through the less dissonant pop Hval

refuses to make.

Other than providing a narrative form for her social

commentary and critique, though, the vampire story

arc also sees Hval accessing a more spontaneously

emotional form of expression, and one which is intricately

connected with her frustration at the state

of things. Opening track ‘Ritual Awakening’ ends

with “It’s so loud / And I get so afraid / So I start

speaking”, explaining her need to speak out as resulting

from the oppressive atmosphere she senses around

her. And speak she does, as if the words are coming

to her naturally. Though she employs her voice like

an instrument, it never feels particularly contrived,

with softly spoken segments flowing just as readily

as violent outbursts of sadness. This is bolstered by

its range of samples, from pained panting – its sexual

overtones rendered sickening as Hval sings “It hurts

everywhere” – to goofball chats with friends. What’s

stunning is that the result is fragile, emotive and raw,

but somehow this doesn’t discredit its political message

– there’s no dismissing this as ‘hysterical’!

If my review has come across as more of an essay

than a critique, it’s because Jenny Hval has created

an album with such galvanising force that it seems to

demand discussion and action. You might not agree

with it, you might find it too scary for after dark, and

you certainly won’t want to play it at dinner parties

or during sex. But regardless of how you feel about

Blood Bitch, it’s an album you’ll not be able to ignore.

September 28, 2018

Wilco - Star Wars

I really looked forward to the new album by one

of my old-time favorites, Wilco. As it turned out

the expectations did not keep up with the results.

Instead of a ‘new’ exiting album, we got a rather

dull piece of music, where only one number (‘You

Satelite’) stood out against the rest, althought it

leans on a weird combination of Bruce Springsteen

doing Velvet Underground. That one number

alas was not as good as previous works, like for

instance A Ghost Is Born, the album which fired

my love for Wilco.

This one is best characterised as “Dad’s Rock” and

shares that genre with other mainstream rock that

is more merchandise than music and keeps a favourite

place among the fashioned conservatives from

the pop-consuming masses.

Let’s say it is music for the millions, for the postbabyboom

generation who indulge in nostalgic

memories of their past ‘wild years’ and find themselves

in a more or less comfortable middle-class

life with mortgages and such, too busy to maintain

their debt to be truly revolutionary.

Dreaming about a revolution which never matured

because the musical tastes developed in directions

too complicated to follow and so finding relief in

what is known and familiar, the “easy way”, backed

by an installed fanbase too dedicated to let them

down, I guess.

Like some rock music is not rock music but a pastiche

of the genre, this album by Wilco shows a

self-cannibalising retro approach bands can develop

when success is finally established.

How the ‘middle class’ musical taste is formed and

authentically expressed is a dangerous subject of

which the receipt of the book by Chris McDonald

is a good example, as you can read in PopMatters.

Middle-class public and more precisely that group

of middle-class known as ‘hipsters’ as the current

favorite marketing group for the music industry

surely leaves its mark and is prone to be corrupted

by the neoliberal market tendencies which has its

lackeys even in – or maybe specifically in – practioners

of that branch of pop music sometimes

known as “Indie”.

Hopefully another old time favorite, Mercury Rev,

will not eventually dissapoint me as well and maybe

Wilco’s next album will reassure its previous

status as being progressive music.

A. Andreas September 22, 2015

29

30

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

2010 - 2020

31

10-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

Beautiful Freaks 2010-2020

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