Can't Get You Out of my Head (by Sydney Harris)

Walking to the Ratty this morning for a 3 p.m. breakfast, I experienced a sudden irrepressible urge to hear Vampire Weekend’s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” Had I attempted to ignore this impulse, I suspect that my head would have exploded on site. Fortunately, my need was immediately satisfied by my personal headset, with which I have a complicated relationship. My serious and perhaps incurable addiction to music renders my headphones virtually indispensable. The prospect of my favorite bands joining me on my morning commute motivates me to get out of bed, especially in winter when I would otherwise refuse to step outside my dorm.

More than a just convenient tool, I contend that headphones are also a social phenomenon. With such an array of aesthetic and utilitarian variables, a person’s headset communicates almost as much about their character as the music piping through the earpieces. The potentially deafening earbuds that come standard with the ubiquitous iPod can say, “I’m a minimalist,” or, “My future ability to discern sounds does not concern me.” The message of flashier models is basically “I am an incredibly hip audiophile with no time to spare for you or the vapid conversation in which you may attempt to engage me.” The little white buds give me a headache, so my own headphones fall into this latter category, thereby introducing a psychological dilemma.

When I wear my headphones, other people have no idea that I tend to value the presence of live human beings over disembodied sound recordings. With my brain entirely devoted to music that no one else can hear, each person I meet is forced to compete with the Cure or PJ Harvey for my attention, and who could hope to prevail in such a battle? I visualize my friends succumbing to inferiority complexes, institutionalized for their feelings of inadequacy. Then again, my headphones do become quite handy when I encounter someone whose voice causes bile to rise in my throat. They also stimulate the voyeur in me; I delight in watching other people dance publicly to their music as wildly as they would in their own rooms. In my imagination, that girl carrying a Louis Vuitton tote secretly enjoys hardcore punk through her pristine earbuds, just as that huge football player silently taps his foot to Feist.

All in all, headphones are not inherently evil devices. What I really take issue with is the isolationism running rampant in our society of personal gadgets and text messages. Nevertheless, since I find it nearly impossible to accomplish everyday tasks without musical aid, I guess I’ll have to embrace the necessity of these seemingly innocuous devices. For any interested parties, I am starting a support group for personal headset addicts. Meetings will be conducted entirely in writing so that members may concentrate on the mp3s of their choosing.

(Picture courtesy of hypebeast--yes, they are crystal-encrusted.)

REVIEW: Los Campesinos!-Hold On Now, Youngster...

Stressed-out college students of America, your wait is finally over. Los Campesinos! has finally discovered the perfect cure for your midterm malaise—the strong dose of energetic indie pop provided on their debut full-length Hold On Now, Youngster. The band’s homeland of Wales isn’t exactly known for its pleasing climate and sunny skies, which seems to have forced the seven-person group to make their own sunlight with warm, smooth boy-girl vocals, fast guitar hooks, and even a freakin’ glockenspiel. In many ways, they pack a similar pop-punk-punch as Fallout Boy, but with Morrissey and the Stooges as actual influences and not just buzzwords.

As the album title implies, this is a young band making young music. Lyrical themes including doodling skeletons “to get across a sense of impending doom,” and they’re not afraid to whip out song titles like “This is How You Spell ‘Hahaha, We Destroyed the Hopes and Dreams of a Generation of Faux-Romantics.’”

The lyrics are honest, vibrant, and clever, and the songs themselves are just as charismatic. Buzz song “You! Me! Dancing!” has been around the blogs for a while, but it still feels fresh despite clocking in at almost seven minutes. “Drop It Doe Eyes” features a sweet string-laced chorus of “Deer die with their eyes wide open” but keeps it from getting maudlin with an intense buildup to a frantic ending, and the follow-up track “My Year in Lists” maintains the energy for less than two minutes of sheer exuberance. In fact, Los Campesinos! is one of the most genuinely exuberant bands to enter the rock scene in a while, making Hold On Now, Youngster the perfect album to lead us into spring.

5/5

All Points West

What’s the one thing Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Bonnaroo have in common other than their status as massive, highly respected music festivals? They’re nowhere near the East Coast. For many Brown students, that makes attending these festivals an ordeal or an impossibility. This summer, however, there’s no need to permanently move to Tennessee for Bonnaroo access or tattoo corporate logos on your body for Lollapalooza road-trip money. The New York City area is featuring the brand-spanking-new All Points West Music & Arts Festival on August 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th (for those looking to maximize the rock, it’s the weekend after Lollapalooza).

Located in Jersey City’s Liberty Park, All Points West features a scenic view of the Statue of Liberty and New York City. Of course, you’re not paying for the view. For such a young festival, All Points West has an extremely strong lineup of festival favorites and latest things. It’s also a solid mix of mainstream crowd-pleasers and hipster darlings. Radiohead will headline on both Friday the 8^th and Saturday the 9^th in what looks to be the bands only New York area appearance on its upcoming tour, while frat boy hero Jack Johnson plays Sunday night.

Friday’s lineup is currently the most appealing and pop-influenced, as it includes the New Pornographers, Brazilian dance-rockers CSS, mashup king and Spring Weekend performer Girl Talk, and the smooth singer and violinist Andrew Bird. On Saturday, don’t miss the crazy kids in Animal Collective, the cheesily slick dance music of Chromeo, and former Spring Weekend success The Roots. Husky-voiced Cat Power and cool buzz band The Black Kids perform Sunday. It’s going to be a smaller festival than its contemporaries as far as ticket sales and attendance are concerned, but there’s nothing small about this lineup. For music fans, All Points West will hopefully serve as a starter festival, weekend day trip or sacred pilgrimage for years to come.

REVIEW: The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

What, no concept album? It’s difficult for a diehard Mountain Goats fan to not pose this question after hearing Heretic Pride, the latest album from John Darnielle and company. Darnielle’s been crafting concept albums since 2002’s harrowing Tallahassee, a fictional portrait of bitter middle-aged drunks trying to keep their life together. 2005’s The Sunset Tree is his best effort to date, featuring humbly affecting melodies and heartwrenching lyrics about growing up in an abusive home and dreaming of escape and revenge.

Sadly, The Mountain Goats followed The Sunset Tree a year later with the breakup-themed bummer Get Lonely. The tunes were mostly mellow to the point of stagnation, and if you think it’s hard listening to someone whine about their breakup for 45 minutes imagine it in album form. That’s why the prospect of a non-concept Mountain Goats album held some promise. Darnielle seemed to have run out of truly compelling personal stories on Get Lonely, and Heretic Pride had the potential to be a return to the fascinating short fiction he’s always done well.

It’s true that Heretic Pride’s lyrics live up to expectations. “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident” is a detailed character study of a sweaty, zonked-out metal fan that also reveals aspects of the narrator’s life and personality, making it succinct but multifaceted and complete. The stomping, scary “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” features images of “Hubcaps on the cars like funhouse mirrors” and our beloved state of Rhode Island as it “drops into the ocean.” Every song has at least one truly memorable line, from “I am this great unstable mass of blood and foam” in “Autoclave” to “When the scum begins to circle the drain / Everybody loves a winner” in the awesomely named “Michael Myers Resplendent.” We’ve come to expect this level of lyrical prowess from The Mountain Goats, and for some fans it’ll be enough to make the album enjoyable.

However, once considered apart from its lyrics Heretic Pride features some of Darnielle’s worst songwriting yet. One example of this can be found in the intros to “Sax Rohmer #1” and “Autoclave”—separated by only two songs, they’re practically interchangeable with essentially the same starting note and tempo. This sameness pervades the album, and there’s none of the drama that would befit Darnielle’s dramatic lyrics. There’s a sense that you’ve heard all these songs before, albeit with worse lyrics. Darnielle’s proven that he’s capable of writing catchy, powerful tunes, so where the heck are they? Ultimately, Heretic Pride will only satisfy the fans who hang on to Darnielle’s every word while tuning out all the rest.

REVIEW: Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

After the breakup of both his relationship and band about two years ago, Bon Iver (real name Justin Vernon) moved to an isolated cabin in Wisconsin where he hunted and made music for three months. The resulting For Emma, Forever Ago is remarkable for its sincerity. At his show at AS220 last winter, even a deaf person must have found the intensity remarkable with Vernon, sweating like Shaquille O'Neal, eyes either clenched shut or tearing, essentially squeezing out the vocals in his tender falsetto. Mixing that falsetto, multi tracked guitar strums, and his own background harmonies, Vernon provides everything from a a triumphant trumpet section on the title track to a winning single with a Cat Stevens like chorus in 'Skinny Love' . Never lost in the sad bastard lyrics is a real pop sensibility that keeps the songs playing on repeat in your head long after you've stopped listening. The problem with making music by yourself is that you miss out on a producer's advice, namely, to make songs that don't tend to run together, especially the instrumental and boring 'Team'. That said, for a record made in isolation, Bon Iver manages to create an incredibly universal feeling.

Hooligan Fire and Other Delights: A Conversation with Hugh Hopper

Within just a few years in the late 60's, pop music turned into pop art which turned into art rock. Songs got longer, the lyrics got important, and the lines separating genres became blurry. It was about this time in Canterbury, England when a group of privileged jazz fans, dirt poor beat group vets, and all sorts of musicians starting forming the bands like The Soft Machine and Caravan. Known as "the Canterbury scene", these bands, along with their spin offs and side projects, leave a huge trail of music melding rock, jazz, folk, and classical to a whimsical sense of fun. Last week The Post- caught up with Hugh Hopper, bass player for The Soft Machine, In Cahoots, Equip'Out, and a recent project with Doctor Nerve leader (and Brown alumn) Nick Didkovsky.

Post: You seem to improvise with the finesse of a jazz player but you also aren't afraid to bring out the fuzz bass. Do you consider yourself a jazz player or a rock player? Or are those categorizations meaningless to you?

Hugh: Good question – a jazzer would say I’m not a real jazz player, and a rocker would say I’m not a real rock musician! I love things about jazz and I love things about rock. But also classical, ethnic, electronic. All the influences from all those genres are in my head somewhere. And not only “music” – I am influenced by noises, sounds, atmospheres from the past. So many and over such a long period from infancy onward that it’s impossible to separate them by now.

Post: Sometimes it seems your compositions have a very pronounced melodic figure, while other times it sounds like they've grown out of a bass pattern or a tape loop. How do you usually compose?

Hugh: Both those methods. Sometimes I start with a melodic idea, sometimes with a chord sequence, and sometimes with an electronic idea like a loop. Depends on the project.

Post: Between 1978 and 1983 you took a break from recording for the most part. Do you see this now as lost time, or did you need that time off to recharge your creativity?

Hugh: Certainly not lost time – I was writing (fiction and journalism). And it wasn’t a conscious decision to stop playing and composing – the desire for music just left me for a couple of years.

Post: What album that you were involved in are you most proud of?

Hugh: There are more than a hundred by now, so I would say that there good things about many albums… but Robert Wyatt’s “Rock Bottom” is a record I am pleased with, also my solo record “Hopper Tunity Box”. Those are both studio recordings, but there are many live albums, like the Cuneiform Soft Machine releases that I like, because they show how powerful the band was live – the studio recordings of SM were interesting and influential but they didn’t have the hooligan fire that we generated live on tour.

I like the different sides of my musical life – sitting in a studio doing intricate things for albums like “Hopper Tunity Box” has a different vibe from playing live – improv or arranged music. The adrenaline buzz of playing live with other lunatics is another facet of life. I love both sides.

Post: Lately you've been gigging with numerous collaborators and pickup bands instead of the write/record/tour/write/record/tour treadmill of a conventional act. Do you find your current way of doing this more satisfying?

Hugh: Two different parts of life. Satisfying in different ways.

Post: You were recently in the U.S. playing a few shows with Bone, your project with Nick Didkovsky. Could you tell us a little about that band?

Hugh: Ha, it started weirdly. Steve Feigenbaum of Cuneiform Records invited me to contribute to a compilation CD [Unsettled Scores-ed.] he was producing, where Cuneiform artists recorded their own versions of tunes that other Cuneiformers had already released. I chose one of Dr Nerve’s – “Unna”, which I did completely differently, as a midi computer piece. Nick Didkovsky, leader of Dr Nerve, said he liked it, so I suggested we record together sometime… five or so years later Nick followed up with the plan for Bone. We still hadn’t met in person. He wrote some pieces and sent them to me to add bass to in my studio in England, and I did the same. John Roulat added live drums and Nick mixed the whole shebang. We still hadn’t met! Then in December 2006 we did a gig in New York, thanks to Bruce Gallanter of Downtown Music Gallery, who set up and paid for a great week of visiting musicians at The Stone. Could have been a disaster (the music is pretty uncompromising and not at all obvious mostly), but it was a blast. The three of us gelled immediately, musically and personally. And we did three gigs February 2008, one at Nick’s showcase at the Whitney Museum in New York, the second at that oasis of music in Baltimore, The Orion, and a freebie in Bruce Gallanter’s store on Bowery, NYC. Hope to do more…

Post: Is it true you didn't meet the rest of the band until a couple hours before your first gig with them?

Hugh: Yep, almost. Well, we did a couple of rehearsal days before the gig at The Stone.

Post: Can we expect another album from the band?

Hugh: Certainly. Studio and live. All our gigs so far have been recorded, and since there is a fair amount of improv that varies from gig to gig, there is plenty of new live music to choose from.

Post: With a lot of material from the Canterbury scene getting reissued on cd, including your Hoppertunity Box and plenty of Soft Machine archival stuff, is there ever any temptation to do some sort of avant-jazz version of an oldies review?

Hugh: Well, I am already involved in several projects that revisit Soft Machine music – Polysoft and Soft Bounds in France, Soft Machine Legacy in UK, Brainville3 with Daevid Allen and Chris Cutler (doing very weird versions of Softs music as well as new stuff), Humi (improv duo with Japanese keyboard/vocalist Yumi Hara)…

Post: You've worked with both Elton Dean and Pip Pyle, two great musicians who've recently passed on. What are your favorite memories of playing with them?

Hugh:In the eighties I played with Pip in several bands and we used to slot together rhythmically like a pair of bizarre serpents. You couldn’t call it metronomically correct, but by God it was organic and steaming. Pip was a mixed personality – generous and enthusiastic but also a totally egocentric child when he wanted to get his own way.

Elton was of course a monster sax player. I toured with him in many different bands, from 1969 till just before his death in 2006. We had our ups and downs personally but despite different musical approaches (his great love was free improv, the music of the moment being the most important thing to him… although he was also a great composer and player of “straight” tunes), we could play together naturally and there were many magical moments, live and in the studio. This is not to be sniffed at – just because two musicians can play well individually doesn’t automatically mean that they will produce great music together.

Post: If you could get the players of your choice in the same room at the same time to play with you, who would they be?

Hugh: I have been so lucky already to record and gig with great musicians from several countries. The ones who always bring a smile to my face or a shiver up the spine as soon as I hear the first note they play: Phil Miller, Patrice Meyer, Simon Picard, Pierre-Olivier Govin, Simon Goubert, Regis Huby, Liam Genockey, Daevid Allen, Frank Roberts…

But of course there is no guarantee that if you got them all in the same room together that the music would automatically be more than the sum of its parts. That’s why I am happy to do many different projects.

Check out these Canterbury scene classics:

The Soft Machine – Third

When Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge, and Robert Wyatt augmented their already experimental psychedelica by recruiting a young jazz sax player named Elton Dean, the result was this mind bending double album filled with distorted jazz, tape loops, brass quartets, and a semi-sensical ditty called "Moon in June." Never before or since has a band taken on Bitches Brew on it own turf and rivaled the innovations of electric Miles.

Caravan – If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You

Led by the drugged out folk songwriting of Pye Hastings, the high point of their masterpiece is "For Richard", a quarter hour of fuzz organ and saxophone vamps without a single note wasted.

Robert Wyatt – Rock Bottom

After a fall paralyzed him from the waist down, ex-Soft Machine drummer concentrated on recording this fragile and harrowing work that has made his reputation with hipsters to this very day. Dominated by shimmering organ and his indescribable vocals, Wyatt and an all-star cast created a truly timeless work.

Hatfield and the North – The Rotter's Club

This short-lived Canterbury supergroup took everything you could love about the scene- silly song titles, jazz tinged compositional trickery, and beautiful melodies- and stretched them out in all directions. Don't be fooled by the title ("Mumps") or the lyrics (they're about the alphabet), their side-long magnum opus is all about Dave Stewart's Fender Rhodes.

Hugh Hopper – Hopper Tunity Box

Upon leaving The Soft Machine, Hopper recorded some sessions with his friends, and then manipulated the sounds until he had one he came up with what may be the strongest album of his career. Highlights include an Ornette Coleman cover and the gorgeous Coltrane tribute "The Lonely Sea and Sky".