On AI-generated art

 With the rapid recent improvement in the capabilities of art-generating AI algorithms, there has been a natural and predictable backlash against it from an outspoken majority of human artists.  This backlash has been largely financially motivated, and seemingly, from my perspective, driven in large part by professional freelance artists, particularly those who specialize in digital art, it seems to me, which is perhaps natural as the AI algorithms are generating digital art themselves, being of course unable to create physical paintings on canvas.

This reaction tends toward two arguments that I will argue are contradictory, overall making it difficult for me to find them terribly convincing in combination. The implied conclusion from these arguments is that AI generated art is bad and that we should stop using and publicizing these algorithms.  They are as follows:

1. AI generated art is inferior to art created by human artists
2. AI generated art is stealing from human artists and is immoral

I have seen Argument 2 more frequently, but Argument 1 is common enough to severely undermine Argument 2, serving as a persistent reminder of why I find myself if not un-sympathetic, then unconvinced, which I have found to be somewhat surprising given my appreciation for art and my natural inclination to support artists.  Two of my grandparents were artists, after all, and a distant relative of mine was Winslow Homer, who was a very influential figure in the history of American art.  Yet, from my perspective, none of these people would have been impacted at all by the development of AI-generated art if it had occurred in their lifetimes, for reasons I will argue.

Firstly, I will address the contradiction between the two arguments.  I actually agree with Argument 1, which makes Argument 2 much more difficult for me to agree with.  There seem to be many people who agree with both, which I find puzzling.  If AI generated art is inferior to human created art, then how does it threaten human artists?

The answer to this would seem to involve the following.  First off, Argument 2 must rely on idea that AI generated art, while to some extent inferior to human created art, is not inferior enough to make up for the ease with which someone can create AI-generated art.  In many ways, this is not untrue.  For someone like me, I would never be able to see a painting of, for example, Acadia National Park in the style of Tom Thomson, without spending lots of money to find an artist who could create such a painting, or myself becoming so proficient that I could do this myself.  The former would of course be much easier, but even that would be quite costly and time consuming.  What actually happened before AI-generated art was that this art (or image if the term art should not apply here) would never be created, and I would have to imagine what this would have looked like.  

This is the real issue with Argument 2.  The financial loss of opportunity created by an AI art algorithm is actually miniscule for the human artist in this scenario, which is the say, in the scenario in which quality is either important or unimportant.  Where quality is important, AI-generated art is insufficient to replace a talented human artist.  Where quality is unimportant, the scenario is generally one in which the consumer would not consider it worth paying for a human artist.  Where AI-generated art may deprive a human artist of work would seem to me to be scenarios where someone is willing to spend a small amount for something small and of moderate quality, comparable to a tattoo in size or complexity.  Such items may have enough sentimental value but be simple enough for consumer and artist to agree to a small fee, and perhaps, given that some of these algorithms can produce variations of images, these could be replaced with AI-generated art and deprive a human artist of work.

I suspect that most of the fear among artists generated by the proliferation of AI-generated images is largely speculative, and derives from a few sources.  Of course, prognostication of the impact of a development such as this is difficult to perform, and so it is not unnatural to attribute to AI art algorithms a level of quality that they do not possess, while simultaneously, out of defensiveness, deriding them as inferior to a human artist.  Such contradictory feelings are part of human nature, after all.  Many people in the art community have compared themselves (favorably, as I've seen) to Luddites, and it would not surprise me to learn that the Luddites believed both that textile mills would push them out of the market, and that they were inferior in quality.  They were not incorrect in this pair of beliefs, but the key difference in this case is that textiles are a necessary good, whereas art is not, and as a luxury good, has already been priced beyond the capacity of most people to afford it.  Luxury goods of this sort have continued to survive despite being undercut in price by cheaper competitors.  We can still buy fine lace and leather good, fine carpets, expensive watches and automobiles, and any other sort of luxury good despite there being cheaper competitors that are of acceptable quality.  The existence of a Honda Civic hasn't prevented Rolls Royce from continuing to exist.

I suspect there is also something of a conservative reaction, so to speak, to the development of AI-generated art.  Walter Benjamin, in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction noted a cult value to art.  Even early reactions to film, he notes, treat it as a cult object.

 It is instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the “arts” forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it

It is natural that the same tendency could be coming into play here. The algorithm is a non-human entity trespassing into the sacred space of art. Just as graven images are deemed sacrilegious in Abrahamic religion, it's not unnatural that the transgression of automated generation into art -- a realm which has retained such spiritual trappings as "genius", "revelation", and "calling" even as the rest of the world has tended toward secularism, particularly since the invention of photography -- would be regarded in the same way. Indeed, one finds among so-called outsider artists the common motivation of messages from God, and debates over what counts as "art" have continued even when hairs are split over works of human creation.

The outsider artist, in fact, may be the figure that makes me most certain that art will continue to survive. Is it possible that some people may be dissuaded from learning to paint due to the knowledge that AI can create decent looking images? Certainly, but at the same time, throughout human history, there has been a tendency for man to create art for his own gratification, even where there was no financial incentive. The first cave drawings may have been motivated by a spiritual impetus, but also must simply have been a means of expression and a rewarding pastime. As the cult significance of art has declined and artists have knowingly nurtured the authenticity of art as a source of its monetary value (Deschamps' Ready-Mades being the obvious apex of this), art as a pastime, divorced from financial incentive, has continued to survive and inspire, and doubtless will continue to do so.

Xbox One Controller on PC Issue that I want to Document

 I ran into this strange Xbox One controller issue on my PC, and resolved it, so I want to record it here because when I was looking for solutions, I found nothing similar to it on the Internet.

The problem was that the right and left triggers, even though I was pushing them all the way down, would only provide partial input.  I found a site to test controller performance, here https://gamepad-tester.com and found that what was really happening was that when I pushed the right trigger all the way down, it would stutter a lot and only max out at around 80% to sometimes as low as 30% of the trigger, whereas when I pushed the left trigger all the way down, it would, weirdly, activate all the way, but also activate 20% to up to 60% of the right trigger at the same time, essentially cancelling it out.  I thought this was a USB issue because I had an old controller where the left stick had gone off center, and it had the same issue.

Eventually just to try anything to fix it, I blew hard in to the hold at the top of the controller where the USB chord plugs into it.  I did this a few times, blowing one time very hard (almost getting some saliva into it), and when I plugged it in, it suddenly worked, to my utter disbelief.

Anyway, future human, if you run into this problem, where the right and left trigger don't activate all the way even when you push them down completely, this may be the issue, and blowing into the USB cable connection, if it exists, may be the solution.

Update: About 6 months later, the issue was getting worse and worse, to the point where I'd have to blow into the top every minute or so to get the trigger to work, and even then the solution didn't work every time.  I gave up and bought a new controller :(

Stupid Politics: Something that unnecessarily grinds my gears and I just want to talk about

 Before I mention the problem, I'm fully aware of how stupid it is that this annoys me, because I'm (presumably) not the target of these types of arguments, and that due to its character limits, Twitter is not the ideal way to make them and means that in the name of brevity people leave out the core argument. I'm not even sure that my logic is really sound, but nonetheless, every time I see this type of argument, it drives me insane.  I shall call it the Hypocrisy Paradox, which once again I am aware is kind of an innaccurate name because I'm not sure it's really a paradox, but Appeal to Hypocrisy, which would probably be more a more accurate summation of this logical habit, is already taken by Tu Quoque, which is more ad hominem and a bit different from this (although not altogether different).

I'm talking about arguments like this:

The basic argument is this:

1. You (or "these people" in this tweet) previously said that it was OK that Colin Kaepernick was blacklisted by the NFL. 
   Anyone reading this post (however unlikely) thinking that that was not the case should recall that Dan Orlovsky continued to play for 10 years after going winless in 2008, and in 2017 signed a contract with the Rams (i.e. Dan Orlovsky, among others, was much worse than Kaepernick, but still got a job in the NFL). Kaepernick would have been a fine backup for any team, though I will concede that he may have asked for a higher contract than typical for a backup due to a couple of good seasons on the 49ers.
2. You are now upset about Donald Trump being banned from Twitter in the wake of years of belligerent behavior that frequently amounted to implicitly calling for violence.
3. Therefore, your stance on Kaepernick was hypocritical and not based on your belief that private companies should be able to make decisions based on their political values, but instead were due to racism or your own personal political views.

This is fair, but it's the opposite consideration that annoys me, primarily because the people making these arguments are always on my side with these issues, and I feel like their arguments are fallacious and make me look bad by association.  Also, even though I am explicitly not the target of this tweet, as soon as I read it I apply it to myself because I would never want anyone to follow any rules that I would not follow myself, the rules being logic in this case.  Many of these tweets are also written in the second person, and I therefore read them as if directed toward myself even though they aren't really.

Consider the following points implied by the logic in the above tweet:

1. I thought it was unfair for NFL teams to blacklist Colin Kaepernick for respectfully expressing his opinion about an important issue that was not being addressed in society (police violence against people of color and the lack of consequences for it).
2. I think it was OK for Twitter to ban Donald Trump for being a constant negative influence on society through his angry tirades on their platform.
3. Therefore, I am a hypocrite for thinking private companies can censor Donald Trump but that they should not have blacklisted Colin Kaepernick.

What is unspoken in this tweet is that Donald Trump was inciting violence and Colin Kaepernick did not, and I am 100% certain the author would agree with that, but that does not mean that the second set of points does not still follow from this tweet.  Indeed, someone who disagrees with me might well argue that the ability to play football in the NFL does not constitute free speech while the ability to express yourself using publicly on the Internet is, or should be.  The weight of these mitigating circumstances might make one or the other situation morally acceptable, but fall outside the implicit argument of this tweet that one should either consider all censorship and blacklisting acceptable, or none at all, which is a false choice.

This is sort of a subset of the Tu Quoque logical fallacy, in which you point out someone's past actions (in this case, their past speech) to show that it's hypocritical for them to make a certain statement, even if that statement may be true.  Here's a Wikipedia article that has some simple examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

The frequency with which I see this argument, only ever used by people that I agree with, drives me absolutely nuts, and every time I need to remind myself that it's not meant for me to consider because I already agree with them, but the logic honestly just seems so dumb to me that I can't help but obsess a bit over it.

It's risen to a peak this week (January 2021) as people express the following feelings, which I have seen all over the place:

If you were OK with police violence this summer during the BLM protests, why do you now object to police violence toward people storming the Capitol building to try and undo a democratic election?

Similarly

If police were willing to beat peaceful BLM protestors, why do they now hesitate to use police violence against these right-wing protestors who are also damaging public property?

Since I did not think the police should have used police violence this summer, and frankly were making everything worse than it should have been, the following would seem to be implied:

1. I was not OK with police violence this summer
2. I think it's reasonable to expect police to use physical force to keep people from ransacking a building where people work, thereby threatening their safety and lives, more so than it is reasonable to condone the use of physical force upon people protesting in the streets, which are an area open to the public, though I will add that if I had to choose between people looting a small shop owner or a large US government building, I'd rather they loot the government office, which has means to recoup their stolen and damaged property.
   I'm also not really happy with the fact that a woman was killed this week by the police, although I think the use of force in this case was much more reasonable than the many people (particularly people of color) killed by police for no justifiable reason.  I certainly, however, would not call it "good" that a person was killed by police.
3. Since I object to all police violence, that is why I have reservations about it in this instance (i.e. I think that it was justified but do not wish that there had been more violence). Similarly, though I'm not naïve enough to really believe this is true, one would hope that maybe the police had learned that police brutality is bad and therefore abstained from it in this case.  I doubt that that is true, but that does not mean that I think they should use violence in this case because they already did over the summer, and so it's only fair that they do it again to the other side to balance things out.  

If I were God, I would go back in time and make it so that there was no police violence against BLM protesters, and also not have it now until truly necessary.  I would also not have anyone lose their lives, although, let me be clear, people should face just punishments for the heinous acts that they committed in attempted to contradict the will of the people.  I do, however, maintain that eye for an eye is not something that I support, and seeing people on the left support (like actually support - not just excuse) police brutality in this case strikes me as (hah) a bit hypocritical. 

The Reviews Continue - F into G

THEGIORNALISTI -- FUORICAMPO -- 7.5/10
Italian indie music is in something of a renaissance these days.  With the growth of the Internet as a means to spread awareness of quality music, plus, I suspect, a certain need for dissociation from Italy's currently dysfunctional political situation, the 2010's has seen the proliferation of numerous excellent Italian bands.  In recent years, Calcutta and I Cani have reached nearly unprecedented levels of mainstream (heh) success.  Hand in hand with these new artists, ascending just as the likes of Verdena and Baustelle settle into elder-statespeople status, is Thegiornalisti.  Thegiornalisti occupy a very well established niche comfortably in-between Calcutta and I Cani, combining the raw honesty of Calcutta with the electronic texture of I Cani.  This comfortable middle-ground isn't the result of synthesis, however, but a mere coincidence, as upon listening to Fuoricampo, one overwhelming source of inspiration becomes evident -- '80's synthpop.  And so, like an Italian, male-fronted Chvrches, Thegiornalisti provide a wealth of hooks and throwback aesthetics, with just enough sincerity to separate themselves from the mainstream, if only briefly, as Thegiornalisti have merged into contemporary pop after the tongue in cheek Completamente Sold Out much as Chvrches' latest offering sounds like the dark and poppy album that Taylor Swift should have wanted Reputation to be.  More apt than the Chvrches comparison, however, is reference to the obvious '80's synthpop influence on this album, which is even recognized in words in the chorus of the album's heavy-hitter, "Fine dell'estate" (on which more later): "la colpa è tutta tua, e di qualche film anni ottanta".  And these songs really do sound like they belong on the soundtrack of John Hughes high school flicks, unapologetically so.  But that unapologetic homage to Thegiornalisti's influences is what makes this album, oddly, so unique.  It doesn't pretend to be new or inventive, but digs so far back into what in contemporary music is supposed to be passé: the '80's pop and saccharine mopeyness (see "Proteggi questo tuo ragazzo") with a frankness that is simply disarming.  This album has a lot of style to it, but what about the substance?  Sounding like the '80's isn't enough to build an album around.  What this album is built around is a pair of massively hooky songs with some nice hors d'oeuvres in between.  Following the simple tone-setter opener, "Per Lei", the first of the two giants that bear this album on their shoulders is "Promiscuità", an irresistibly sweet homage to interpersonal intimacy with a pounding base line and melancholy synthesizers over a wide-eyed set of verses that draws you in.  The images presented in this song of words whispered and spoken during late night smoke breaks echo the timeless aesthetic of the song masterfully.  After this are the earnest but sdolcinata "Proteggi questo tuo ragazzi", which delivers on the same set of emotions as "Promiscuità" without quite the same energy level.  The following two songs, largely interchangeable, are a nice, pensive interlude before we build up the the second highlight of this album.  This interlude, the drifting "Mare Balotelli" and "L'importanza del cielo (Miyazaki)", lead into the similarly sweet and longing imagery of "Aspetto che", which leads into the confident punch of synthesizer at the start of "Fine dell'estate", a song that ultimately ends up towering over the rest of the album.  Where most of the rest of these songs rested on atmosphere and nice verses, "Fine dell'estate" breaks the mold with a powerful chorus and driving riff.  If there's anything to remember this album for, it's this song, which leads to the unfortunate downside of this album's construction in that it is ultimately just a vehicle for one stellar track.  Maybe "Promiscuità" and "Proteggi questo tuo ragazzo" would stand on their own better if not for "Fine dell'estate", and maybe I'd actually have some recollection of the songs that come after it.  It just feels like the song that should close the album, and having the comparably light fare of three more songs follow after is like taking aperitivo after secondo piatto.  Sadly, I'm no longer interested in what comes afterward.  Fuoricampo's greatest strength may ultimately be it's greatest weakness.  Nonetheless, when I want to listen to Thegiornalisti, I still find myself drawn to the imbalanced highlights of this album than to the better constructed Completament Sold Out.  Highlights include "Promiscuità", "Aspetto che", "Fine dell'estate"

RIDE -- GOING BLANK AGAIN -- 8.5/10
Ride continue to be the band I underrate to myself the most.  How seriously can I take the band that recorded Carnival of Light and Tarantula?  Whose guitarist went on the play bass in post-Be Here Now Oasis?  Who had to give up the shoegaze limelight that they created to the likes of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine?  This was how I felt when I saw them live last year and was seriously impressed with their set (even the new stuff), and this is how I feel now when I confront the unbelievable truths that I know deep down.  First of all, Ride truly were great in their day.  You'll never find me not in the mood for their best moments, be it "Taste", "Like a Daydream", or "Vapour Trail".  Secondly, and perhaps harder to believe, Going Blank Again, the album with the weird clown on the cover is the best Ride album, not the album with "Vapour Trail" on it and the near perfect album art.  Relistening to this album always reminds me how actually impressive it is.  8:17 opener "Leave Them All Behind": captivating for the entire length (as is reissue bonus track "Grasshopper", which clocks in at 10:56).  "Twisterella": possibly an all time great song, even with the closing chorus "look at Twisterella, hasn't got a fella".  "Cool Your Boots", "Time of Her Time", "OX4": all great.  Yes, there's some filler here after "Twisterella", but when Ride gets into their groove, the earnest and smooth intonations of Mark Gardener and the shimmering riffs of Gardener and Andy Bell hit the spot.  Not to mention the unsung hero of Ride, drummer Loz Colbert, who may not be unleashed as on some of Ride's pre-Nowhere tracks (see the end of "Like a Daydream" for his most impressive work), but when you actually pay attention is providing consistently excellent and remarkably complex rhythm behind the scenes for a band that sounds effortlessly perfect.  And while Ride tend to stick to a formula of clean, layered riffs and equally clean and ingenuous sounding vocals, more on this album than on their debut, they continue to do well when they mix things up, both on the lauded opening track and on thematic variations like "Time Machine".  At the end of the day, however, it's the jangly pop with just a hint of their noisy shoegaze origins that makes this album so listenable, and while it doesn't break the mold like their early EP's and Nowhere did, it finds them in perhaps their best form, producing intriguing hook after hook. Sometimes you just forget that an album doesn't need to pull too many tricks to do its job.  Highlights include "Leave Them All Behind", "Twisterella", "Cool Your Boots"

TEENAGE FANCLUB -- GRAND PRIX -- 8/10
Speaking of albums dominated by one song, how about Grand Prix, one of many fine post-Bandwagonesque efforts for the endearingly optimistic Scottish singer-songwriters.  To get the obvious out of the way, yes, "Sparky's Dream" is one of the best songs ever written.  It may be unassuming, but just listen to it.  There's just something about the way it lifts off going into the chorus that is truly impressive.  In many ways, much as I described for Fuoricampo, the rest of this album feels like it lacks consistency in comparison. Not to see there aren't many great moments on this album.  The opening lines of "About You" continue to be exhilarating, and nearly every song is a quality piece of craftsmanship, from the sneaky-good chorus of "Mellow Doubt" to the sweet, turn-that-frown-upside-down message of "Don't Look Back" and "Verisimilitude" to the sparkly riff of "Discolite".  This album forms a formidable duo with its successor, Songs From Northern Britain, of albums where every track has its charm.  So why does this album still finish as runner-up to Bandwagonesque in the popular imagination?  To my view, it's that maybe it's too consistent.  Even with "Sparky's Dream" racing out like a shooting star to separate itself from the pack of songs on Grand Prix, to some extent this album is one uplifting, jangly pop song after another.  I admire Teenage Fanclub's sunny outlook, and even moreso their consistency, considering this is the work of three main songwriters, but to some extent, warts and all, shifting from the somewhat mundane "December" and "Sidewinder" to the likes of "Alcoholiday", "Star Sign", and "The Concept" helped those songs cement themselves in my memory, perhaps as did "Everything Flows" in comparison to two unnecessary "Heavy Metals".  So while I might pop into to the overall inferior A Catholic Education to hear the opening track or the stellar duo of "Critical Mass" and "Too Involved", Grand Prix provides a host of solid tracks that makes it hard for anything aside from "Sparky's Dream" to stand out.  The same issue unfairly plagues, at least in my mind, the likes of Built to Spills Keep It Like A Secret, where "Carry the Zero" and sometimes "Temporarily Blind" get all of my attention.  Nonetheless, it's impossible to downplay just how consistently solid this album is, and how refreshingly positive is its outlook.  Highlights include "Sparky's Dream", "Verisimilitude", "Going Places".

BLUR -- THE GREAT ESCAPE -- 6.5/10
Capping off my listening trip through some albums with one monster track that completely overshadows everything else on the album, here's the album with "The Universal" on it -- Blur's follow-up to the generation defining Parklife, The Great Escape.  Looking back, you may forget that this is the album that won the so-called Battle of Britpop over Oasis' (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, and perhaps assume that it was Blur's more famous third album that found itself in the ring with Oasis' heavy-hitter (which may have lost the Battle of Britpop but did start the Loudness War).  I suspect if everyone could do it over, this particular battlefield was perhaps a bit misplaced.  Maybe we could have had Modern Life is Rubbish or Parklife instead? Maybe even Dog Man Star or Different Class if we were lucky?  But so be it, The Great Escape won, perhaps a harbinger of the death of Britpop two years later with Oasis' pompous but unsubstantial "let them eat cake" statement, Be Here Now.  While Blur show they still have some ideas left in them, and would go on to follow the reinventions upon which Suede and Pulp were already embarking with one of their own in their self-titled follow-up LP, they only manage to string enough of this ideas together to make one great song and a bunch of okay songs that you can point to and say "well, this moment is good".  Like, there are those background vocals in "Country House".  Those are interesting.  And "Best Days" is depressing, much like some other excellent Britpop music.  And so is "He Thought of Cars", which has that cool intro part.  Unfortunately, there's never enough to build anything truly impressive.  While Modern Life is Rubbish threw hook after hook in your face until you admitted that it was brilliant, and Parklife picked up where that left off with a hooky first half and then surprised you with a dark and moody second half before closing with "This is a Low" (which needs no further description from me), The Great Escape feels like a bit of Blur by numbers.  There are some classically Blur cheeky moments, but ultimately it feels like they're just trying to make another Parklife.  Even "The Universal" starts out feeling like a second "To The End".  Nonetheless, however, it takes the cinematic lushness and swirling chorus of that song turns it into an undeniably towering monument to Blur's tongue-in-cheek suburbanity.  Capping off (although it sits dead in the middle of this 15 track album) three LP's worth of examining the meaningless mundanity of middle-class life, "The Universal" serves as the climactic statement of all of those songs about how work is dull but you do it anyway, and the struggle to find satisfaction and fulfillment from life, declaring "It really, really, really could happen.  When the days they seem to fall through you, well just let them go."  By The Great Escape, Blur really had "made it to the end" of the themes that had carried them through their three breakthrough albums, taking over a movement started by the enigmatic and melodramatic Suede and bringing it to the masses.  Much as Suede had reached an end and hit the restart button with the neon brightness of Coming Up, Blur would have to move on from the simple yet profound guitar pop that they had exhausted to the varied influences that would drive Blur, 13, and Think Tank.  Highlights include "Country House", "The Universal", "He Thought of Cars".

More Reviews - F, part 3 (I love the 2000's)

THE TWILIGHT SAD -- FORGET THE NIGHT AHEAD -- 8/10
Going alphabetically means I do a double-dose of the Sad, but also means I have to go in backwards order.  Fortunately for me, Forget the Night Ahead is as good a starting point as any when approaching The Twilight Sad in a holistic manner.  The 2000's had their fair share of bands who made their debut with instant classics - The Arcade Fire, The Strokes, Interpol, The Libertines, among other, perhaps slightly more under the radar acts like JJ72 or Hope of the States whose debut albums still get all the press.  It's no surprise that Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters should be The Sad's best known album.  In sharp contrast to the more minimalist or stripped down sound of most of the bands mentioned above, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters takes a page out of MBV's playbook with heavy walls of sound, and the stoic yet sensitive and at times intensely impassioned musings of James Graham and his thick Scottish accent make it a distinctive and uniquely memorable sounds.  Forget the Night Ahead, rather than just being the follow-up to Fourteen Autumns, serves as the point of departure for the sound that has defined the band ever since, maintaining moments of shoegazey loudness but for the most part moving more toward a more sparse presentation that is more comparable to their post-punk contemporaries, Interpol in particular, than their debut was.  In this, one might regret that the walls of sound that set their debut apart have been more and more left to the wayside, but, on the other hand, it freed The Twilight Sad to approach their songs in a more conventional manner, allowing them to showcase the flashy choruses that they were always meant to write.  Where their debut draw a certain vague beauty from the mystery of repeated phrases like "your red sky at night won't follow me", "these walls are filled with blame", or "your green eyes turn to blue", Forget the Night Ahead makes more use of a more typical verse-chorus structure, and, when done most effectively, presents some seriously impressive bangers.  Chief among these is second track "I Became a Prostitute", which hops adeptly from chorus to chorus - "we're all fine in the back of your mind..." to "you are the bearer of a womb without love" - with an aggressive heft accented with the same jagged but now clearer guitar din as always.  Forget the Night Ahead starts off strong, with four stellar tracks, but, not entirely unlike Fourteen Autumns, slows down in the middle.  The likes of "That Birthday Present" and "At the Burnside" do their best to pick things up on the back half, but overall the album feels like it becomes a bit samey over time.  Not to say that The Twilight Sad aren't great a what they do best - heavy and earnest elegiacs with deceptively catchy hooks - but over time, the impact is dulled, such that the simple but direct introduction to "Interrupted" becomes one of the highlights of the album.  Taken alone, each of these songs still packs a punch, and while the sound of this album moves toward the broader trends in 2000's indie and post-punk, one can now see that this was a crucial step in forging the sound that would emerge, like a dark and cynical butterfly, from its cocoon with Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave.  This is not to say that Forget the Night Ahead doesn't have value on its own, as it's packed with a seething energy, but it's not quite as tight as The Twilight Sad's first and most recent releases.  Highlights include "I Became a Prostitute", "Seven Years of Letters", "That Birthday Present", "At the Burnside".

THE TWILIGHT SAD -- FOURTEEN AUTUMNS & FIFTEEN WINTERS -- 9/10
I could have sworn I'd reviewed this album before, but apparently not.  After the listening to Forget the Night Ahead, hitting play for this album and hearing the tinny piano and slide guitar gently growing at the start of "Cold Days from the Birdhouse" is like going home after a year abroad.  It's familiar, and yet there's a newness to it that comes in spending time away.  It's been awhile since I listened to this album, not because I don't really, really enjoy it, but just from having been listening to other stuff lately (mostly emo, please don't judge).  Right away, there's a quality to it that a lot of the other major classic albums of the 2000s were missing.  Because where it shares bits and pieces of what made some of those other albums, listed in the previous review, great, this is one of those few albums that puts it all together.  It's got that rusticity that made Funeral so different at the time, the darkness and cynicism of Turn On the Bright Lights, the youthful restlessness of the likes of Is This It, and the open frankness of another Scottish band of the 2000s that means so much to me (Idlewild, who combined these elements before they even existed in their separate forms on the 2000 masterpiece 100 Broken Windows).  For all the novelty of how this album sounds, it's got the goods to back it up.  The first two tracks on this album may be the best on any album, ever, traversing between warmth and passion with a natural ease that's immediately relatable.  But it's not all about "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" and "That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy", it's about the poetic moments that effervesce out of thin air throughout this album, separated by scenic, layered soundscapes.  Because of the hefty titles of these songs, which on any other album would appear pompous and overwrought (see Funeral), it's hard to remember exactly where these moments appear, but when moments like "and why do they come when you're always raining", "and do your fear not grow when you see that you're all mine, with a knife in your chest", or "head up dear, the rabbit may die", the words themselves, on reflection, don't seem to mean anything, but there's a certain significance in the way they're expressed, like an abstract painting, the communicates a profound emotion.  Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters may be inconsistent at times, but this is a remarkable album in the way in which is communicates its messages, through climaxes of energy and obfuscated language, that is special in unique.  Highlights include "Cold Days From the Birdhouse," "That Summer, At Home I Became the Invisible Boy", "Walking for Two Hours", "And She Will Darken the Memory".

THURSDAY -- FULL COLLAPSE -- 7.5/10
Ooooooooooh boy.  This is an album that likes to live on the edge if there ever was one.  Much like Finelines, reviewed in my last set now nearly a year ago, Full Collapse is very much emblematic of it's time, it's polished production and over the top angst in this case not a product of its time, but, in fact, the archetype of it's time.  You see, Full Collapse is the album that defined screamo as a sub-genre, which is sure to give it a black mark through the lens of time, chaining its legacy to the likes of AFI and The Used, and not undeservedly, perhaps.  In marked contrast to some of the more lavish emo albums of the '90's, Mineral's The Power of Failing, for instance, Full Collapse is flawlessly sleek and and almost laboratory levels of clean, such that in moments of over-the-top emotion, one hesitates to blame it on youthful exuberance or the foibles of inexperience.  Such is the case of the odd introduction "A0001", which seems like it should introduce a sci-fi concept album rather than the raw confessional that follows.  This is followed immediately, however, by the serpentine riff of the vivid and monumental "Understanding in a Car Crash", which sets the tone for this album of highly polished emo anthems, accentuated by a healthy dose of screams.  In comparison to the likes of more recent emo bands like The Hotelier or The World is a Beautiful Place..., Full Collapse isn't quite as excessive as one might assume for the band that put screamo on the map, but it is at least a little bit over the top.  It does add a significant potency to the likes of "Autobiography of a Nation" and, especially, "Cross Out the Eyes", but by the time we get to "I am the Killer" and the otherwise very good "Winding Up", it starts to feel unnecessary.  Perhaps fittingly, this is an album of extremes.  First of all, there will be plenty that will despise this album for fitting too well into the much maligned yet nonetheless popular scene that it would ultimately be crucial in spawning, and many will find the constant flow of unhinged emotion, "the sound of your shotgun pulse sounding over and over in your silent halls", to be just too much.  At its core, however, Full Collapse is a gripping album, full to the brim with energy, and if you can throw restraint to the wind, you may just be able to get swept up in it.  Highlights include "Understanding in a Car Crash", "Concealer", "Cross Out the Eyes", "Standing on the Edge of Summer".

ARCADE FIRE -- FUNERAL -- 8.5/10
There was a time I disdainfully refused to give the Arcade Fire a serious listen.  At a time when all my friends who listened to indie music would not shut up about them, the more so with the Butler brothers spending their summers in a town near mine (and filming the video for what I now think to be their best song, "Rebellion (Lies)", in that same town, where my grandparents live), a time when they won the obligatory indie band Grammy for an album that is probably only their third best, all while bands like, say, The Twilight Sad, were completely ignored, a time when they were emblematic of that lumberjack hipster aesthetic that everyone hates but to which I am now ambivalent, I couldn't bear to listen to them as a matter of principle.  Well, times have changed.  I could smugly pan Reflektor as pompous, overambitious (as I listened through Dog Man Star for the billionth time) and yet not especially good, and be right about it, and now that Everything Now has happened... I guess I can make my peace with The Arcade Fire.  People are all about The National now, I think (their best work now a decade behind them), so I can drop my righteous indignation and give them an honest listen, after all this time.  Now, as you can see, there are lots of random, external factors that go into our tastes.  Just as I said hearing the shimmering opening notes to "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" brings me back to when I first heard The Twilight Sad, maybe I'd feel the same about the remarkably similar opening piano to "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", written three years earlier, to give credit where it's due.  Funeral, likewise, must have felt like a precious gem at the time when it came out.  With the cold and cynical attitude of Interpol, The Strokes, and The Arctic Monkeys so prevalent at the time, having a band come out using every kind of percussion instrument available and unafraid to show some vulnerability must have been a breath of fresh air.  This is an album that, compared to those other albums, has quite a bit of variety to it, from the earnest intensity of "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" and "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" to the hushed confessionals "Un Annee Sans Lumiere" and "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)".  Overall, Funeral uses its rustic production to great effect, containing a certain tenseness like a coiled spring that is never quite released, and the combination of Butler's and Chassagne's voices are amplify that impression elegantly.  Taking the aesthetic of Neutral Milk Hotel and slowing it down into stately ballads and angsty anthems, this album sounds timeless even now, over a decade later, by virtue of it sounding like a Pre-Raphaelite relic even at the moment that it was released.  While this album at times slows down in the middle and straddles the cliché at moments, it contains more than a few truly special moments, and remains deserving of the praise that has been lavished upon it.  Highlights include "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)", "Haiti", "Rebellion (Lies)"

More Reviews (F, part 2)

MY VITRIOL -- FINELINES -- 8/10
There are plenty of reasons not to give My Vitriol a fair shake - their somewhat whiny vocals (I actually like lead singer Som Wardner's voice, but I know I'm very forgiving of that sort of thing), their fashion sense that more resembles Panic! at the Disco or My Chemical Romance than more similar acts like (though it's hard to make real comparisons) Silversun Pickups or JJ72, and their catastrophically bungled Kickstarter campaign for a second album that could and should have been released over a decade ago.  At the same time, however, Finelines, the band's first and only album, is a gripping and engaging record whose first half seems to move at the speed of light, and whose second half uses a shoegazy languor to solid affect.  More importantly, this is an album that has "Always: Your Way" on it, a brilliant song whose shear emotional force and piercing melody make it stand head and shoulders above the rest of what would still be a very solid album.  Fusing the sweeping guitar aesthetic of Smashing Pumpkins with the desperation and fast pace of bands like Mineral and the Manic Street Preachers (though I very much doubt Mineral is among their influences, they have the same desperate angst and fast, layered guitar melodies), Finelines is an album whose instrumental melodies feel rich yet effortlessly natural and whose lyrics and vocals are dripping with angst, both in the calm verses and surging, passionate choruses.  While the remainder of the songs on the album are hard-pressed to live up to the example of "Always: Your Way," the first song on the album the include any words, flowed into organically from the instrumental "Alpha Waves," they nonetheless maintain an emotional impact that at times crosses the line into the excessive, but overall grabs your attention and is driven by a persistently engaging rhythm.  While some lines like "conscience is the greatest curse / the fridge is filled with just desserts" are clumsily heavy-handed, many of the songs on the album come off as earnest yet confident.  Likewise, the instrumental tracks, while perhaps overproduced compared to your standard instrumental tracks, nonetheless serve as a useful interlude between them.  Thus, the album maintains a fast pace from "Always: Your Way" and "The Gentle Art of Choking" and gradually slows down through to the majestically yearning "The Ode To The Red Queen", with it's chorus "I guess you'll learn soon, she said / ... And I'm trying hard to understand your ways".  The second half is initiated with drifting instrumental tracks and the slow crescendo of "Windows and Walls" until the album is jolted back into alertness with the frenetic pace of "Losing Touch", followed by the slower but still effortlessly catchy and compelling "Pieces".  From here on out, Finelines slowly drifts out to a close, making the ending a bit anti-climactic, but when the remainder of the album is ceaselessly active as the rest of album, with numerous tracks blending into each other as if part of a single piece of music, it's perhaps a necessary sacrifice.  All in all, Finelines, while very much a relic of early 2000's angst and stubbornly unsubtle in its delivery, is certainly worth a complete listen.  This isn't a hard album to get the appeal of, but perhaps it is a difficult album to take as seriously as it deserves to be taken.  Highlights include "Always: Your Way", "Ode To The Red Queen", "Pieces".


THE CRIBS -- FOR ALL MY SISTERS -- 8/10
I remember back around 2010, after I really got into Idlewild, I was looking around for bands that sounded like them, that had the same punk sensibilities but played with the same layered fluidity, had the same sophistication, and wrote with the same frankness.  I never really found anyone who truly satisfied that craving (though I did find everything from Superchunk to Aereogramme), with maybe JJ72 being closest.  It wasn't until years later that I picked up The Cribs' Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever, and album with an angsty bite to it, but with a vaguely melancholy resonance to it, and of course, just as Idlewild broke their own mold with "Idea Track", The Cribs did the same with "Be Safe", a gripping, poetic masterpiece, "a catalogue of images, flashing glimpses, then gone again."  I'll return to Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever later, but this was my background going into For All My Sisters, an album that I listened the hell out of the summer of 2015.  The Cribs have always been a loud band, but even among the louder end of the Cribs spectrum (In the Belly of the Brazen Bull, for example), For All My Sisters stands out as a very loud, in your face album.  Opener "Finally Free" and follow-up "Different Angle" make this immediately and abundantly clear with their angular, treble-dominated guitar riffs, pounding drums, and confidently steady choruses.  Typically, The Cribs have been able to balance this loudness with moments of quiet(ish) introspection, such as "Women's Needs" and "Shoot the Poets" on MNWNW or "Anna" and the multi-part closer of In the Belly of the Brazen Bull.  It's a formula that's worked to heighten the impact of The Cribs louder, more in-your-face moments, but unfortunately it's not executed quite as cleanly on For All My Sisters, where "Simple Story" feels a bit lethargic after the sincere swagger of "An Ivory Hand" and the slower songs of the second half of the album lacking that typical Cribs punch.  Nonetheless, this criticism is minor in comparison to the sheer catchiness of most of the songs on this album.  "Different Angle", "An Ivory Hand", and "Summer of Chances" jump out with earworm choruses that demand attention, while "Mr. Wrong" and "Diamond Girl" snarl with vitality while simultaneously admitting there's a sensitive side to The Cribs as well.  While the second half of For All My Sisters lags in comparison to the first, it still makes for a fun and attention grabbing album that sits comfortably among The Cribs' back catalogue.  Highlights include "Different Angle", "An Ivory Hand", "Diamond Girl".

JAWBOX -- FOR YOUR OWN SPECIAL SWEETHEART -- 9/10
Sometimes you just known when an album is a juggernaut that demands to be heard, and while opener "FF=66" is just a noisy palate-cleanser, For Your Own Special Sweetheart is a heaping plate of non-stop hardcore brilliance, from the hypnotically tense "Savory" through to the lethargic yet impactful "Whitney Walks".  For Your Own Special Sweetheart is a remarkably tuneful album for a DC-hardcore band, and unlike some other bands who try to make the same compromise between noisy intensity and catchy choruses, like Archers of Loaf or Husker Du for example, by having songs that lean more one way or the other, Jawbox succeeds here in creating songs that are brutally and gleefully noisy yet structurally sturdy, with punchy directness and simplicity layered over moments highlighting idiosyncratic originality, like Fugazi and Polvo mashed together.  "Savory" remains the show-stopper on this album, guitar and singer J. Robbins trading spaces in the limelight, each one brutally laconic, with lines like "Hey angel, fly over and bless me" oozing with nonchalance.  "Breathe" follows with it's suddenly fast pace like an out of control train, delivered like Texas is the Reason without the youthful ingenuousness.  While there are a few songs on the noisier end of the spectrum that end up feeling a bit like filler, when Jawbox keep everything thudding along at an even pace, they hit with great effect.  Songs like "Motorist", "Green Glass", and "Reel" combine a stoic calm and steadiness with sweeping climaxes of loudness, while "Cooling Card", "Jackpot Plus", and "Chicago Piano" push the tempo with equal poise.  Overall, this is album that pulses with an energy only heightened by it's consistently clean execution, and while many of the songs are variations on a theme, the whole ensemble has such a constant force to it that For Your Own Special Sweetheart remains a thrill to listen to.  Highlights include "Savory", "Jackpot Plus", "Reel".

Niche Reviews, Part V

MANIC STREET PREACHERS - EVERYTHING MUST GO - 9/10
There's understandably a lot of significance attached to Everything Must Go as it stands in the Manics' discography.  The first album released after the mysterious disappearance of lyricist Richie Edwards, with his lyrics still comprising about half the album, it's inevitable that his album would turn out to be a crossroads for the band - at once a swan song for the edgier, more brash Manic Street Preachers who reached their apex with The Holy Bible and a harbinger of the softer and more personable form the band would take beginning with This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours.  Albums released after the death of a band member always take a form larger than themselves, and take on an additional weight and significance.  Listening to The Lost Riots by Hope of the States, for instance, becomes all the more emotionally impactful with the knowledge that the band's guitarist had committed suicide months before the album's release.  This makes the album difficult to rate as well - I have no qualms in giving extra points to an album for the unfortunate milestone that it represents for the artists responsible for it, but there's also the question of if the album sounds different to someone unaware of the context in which it was written and recorded.  Nonetheless, Everything Must Go is a terrific album that would easily stand up even without this knowledge, and while some of the less immediately grasping songs like "Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky" and the title track are greatly illuminated by this context, this album has plenty of tracks that are tremendously expressive and eminently listenable.  The obvious stand-out is "A Design For Life", the very title of which hints at the ambition that it takes on, and the delivery James Dean Bradfield gives in the chorus is unavoidably chilling in its sincerity.  Other tracks, like "Enola/Alone", "Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning)" (I should note here that Manic Street Preachers are the only human beings that I am aware of who seem to actually appreciate Willem de Kooning.  Even I find his work to be rather unpleasant, and only this song gives it any sort of value for me by revealing his portraits to be depictions of the distorted and wretched beings inside all of us), the sensitively confessional "Further Away", and the simple but soaring closer "No Surface All Feeling" are empowered by Bradfield's potent voice, with to me resembles a more masculine version of JJ72 singer Mark Greaney's in its range and angsty edge (I should note that I'm well aware that Greaney likely borrowed some mannerisms from Bradfield, as JJ72 came to prominence almost a decade after the Manics did).  The album, for all of the pain out of which it must have been created, is remarkable in its forward-thinking attitude, as in the lines "There are times when you feel hopeless / Just for once, for no-one else, we are blameless / The dawn is still breaking, it's heaven is so high" from "The Girl Who Wanted to Be God".  And yet, for all this, the album remains a classic Manic Street Preachers album with its political commentary, with lines like "Libraries gave us power / Then work came and made us free" from "A Design For Life".  All in all, this album is probably the best overall if you someone like me who hasn't quite gotten acquainted with the edgy Manic Street Preachers of The Holy Bible, as it seems to me to be clearly more consistent than the band's later releases.  Highlights include "A Design For Life", "Enola/Alone", "Further Away".

POLVO - EXPLODED DRAWING - 7.5/10
The arbitrariness of doing this in alphabetical order means that I'm reviewing this album before Today's Active Lifestyles, which seems dreadfully inappropriate, but I've already written myself into this corner so I'll have to deal with it.  Polvo is a difficult band to describe to someone who hasn't listened to them.  They're kind of post-rock, since they change time signatures all the time, but they've also got a Lo-Fi punk thing going on.  I guess the best way to explain it is a Archers of Loaf if they only listened to Slint and Rodan for a year.  Not only the time changes, but also the obscure, at times nonsensical lyrics suggest this comparison.  These two elements are shared between Polvo's second album and generally accepted magnum opus, Today's Active Lifestyles, and the follow-up to that album, Exploded Drawing.  The titles of both albums serve as a great summation of each album - where Today's Active Lifestyles was constantly moving and kinetic, yet still strangely controlled, Exploded Drawing seems to find a much looser Polvo, as well as an much angstier one.  This looseness serves as a both a strength and a weakness.  At its strong points, this album seems like a brilliant, stream-of-consciousness work of art, blending lyrical absurdities with a tremendous range of experimentation on guitar.  "Passive Attack" is for me the shining light of this approach - an atmospheric pastiche that seems to sound more like traditional Asian music than American indie rock.  When this album manages to keep things sounding fresh, it's extremely engaging, as in album opener "Fast Canoe", "Street Knowledge", and "Taste of Your Mind."  Polvo's originality with simply instrumental sections shines as well in "Passive Attack", "Street Knowledge", and "The Secret's Secret".  Like many bands leaning toward post rock, sections of brilliance rarely last especially long, but neither to the less interesting moments.  Tellingly, one of the most enjoyable songs on this album is the noticeably uninventive "In This Life," which maintains a standard song structure with a clearly distinct verse and chorus but a still interesting and unique guitar arrangement.  "Taste of Your Mind" similarly courts convention with solid results.  Conversely, some moments go too far into the deep end, such as the almost pointlessly odd "The Purple Bear", with lines like "When I give the signal, start eating dirt, sing into a shovel, and take off your shirt".  Finally, the sheer length of this album, at nearly an hour with a 10 minute closing song, leaves too much opportunity for lost interest.  Nonetheless, this album has many moments where Polvo's originality and wit shine through, with a much more jagged, and perhaps sincere, edge than on the irreverently anarchic and apathetic Today's Active Lifestyles.  Highlights include "Passive Attack", "Street Knowledge", "In This Life".

FAILURE - FANTASTIC PLANET - 9/10
I'm very torn on this one over a very minor distinction.  I think this deserves a 9 like Everything Must Go up above - on the one hand, it's completely brilliant as a whole, and brilliantly manages to establish it's spacey atmosphere seemingly out of nothing. That nothing is the reason I somehow feel like I should keep it at 8.5, which is that the songs themselves, except for the truly transcendent ones on this album, generally hover around the very good level rather than the brilliant level.  And yet, there's something compelling about this album that really sets it apart.  On this surface, this sounds an awful lot like Nirvana, which means it also sounds an awful lot like quite a few mediocre to terrible American bands of the 1990's, but at the same time, there's something gripping about the songs on this album that I find it hard to place.  Maybe it's that creepy clicking motif that reappears throughout?  Maybe it's the fact that there's a sincerity in the songs on Fantastic Planet that other American post-grunge bands fail to communicate?  Take "Sergeant Politeness", for example.  It sounds like a typical grunge song, yet for some reason when that chorus kicks in, with the pulsing, heavy guitar riff, it's impossible to not get swept up in it.  This song doesn't follow Nirvana's quiet-loud formula: it goes from loud to louder, as many of the songs on this album do, including opening track "Saturday Saviour", "Pillowhead", and the especially impressive "Smoking Umbrellas." This is absolutely an album that you need to listen to all the way through.  While some of the songs are outstanding enough to hold up well on their own, the whole thing is just accentuated by playing it in sequence, and not only because it's meant to chart a journey through drug abuse, but because the thrilling force of songs like "Sergeant Politeness" and "Smoking Umbrellas" make the softer moments, such as "Blank" and the jaw-droppingly flawless "The Nurse Who Loved Me" not simply brilliant, but transcendent.  The course from "Segue 3" to "The Nurse Who Loved Me" to "Another Space Song" to the finish is nearly flawless, and starts to defuse the brute force that drives the first few songs of the album.  There's also something about the sound of this album that's dark and empty, like outer space; something strangely over-rational and unfeeling, like the giant aliens from the movie this album was named after.  And while on their own songs like "Pitiful", "Leo", and "Stuck On You" seem unremarkable, this album is truly riveting as a whole, with the best songs transformed by their surroundings into blissful moments of clarity.  Highlights include "Smoking Umbrellas," "Pillowhead", "The Nurse Who Loved Me."