What does "emo" mean, really? It's a surprisingly contentious subject for a lot of people, and there's a lot of flexibility in the way in which people use the term that enables it to encompass a lot of very good music as well as a lot of very crappy music. When I tell people that I've been getting into a lot of emo stuff lately, and they ask, "You mean, like, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, right?", I usually take that as a queue to stop talking about emo music and to start talking about how Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco really did have some good moments, notwithstanding the fact that I really dislike Fall Out Boy's newer output. Regardless though, all those missed opportunities have really given me an itch to talk about the emo music that I like the most, which is the punkier '90's version of emo music. Let me admit that the boundaries are somewhat thin between this sort of music and the newer, scene-inspired emo of the 21st Century. I mean, every emo band is prone to oversensitivity at times - Mineral especially - and even the always cool Jawbreaker were prone to writing a sickeningly saccharine song like "Million" when it came down to it. In the end, what's the difference that makes it sound genuine and meaningful when Texas is the Reason's "A Jack with One Eye" includes a line like "your place is still at the heart of my everything" but makes a band like Boys Like Girls seem like such unaware poseurs? We'll try to answer these questions and more as we try to tackle Mineral's The Power of Failing, an album that, on the surface, would seem to have a lot of issues but that nevertheless pulls through with some compelling and stimulating material.
From the very first song, it's obvious what Mineral's drawing from. They've basically taken the sensitive, non-proggy bits from Sunny Day Real Estate and written a whole album around them, which is honestly just what I was looking for. "47" is a great song in its entirety, but the "swallowed whole / lose myself in you" part is the real highlight. But Mineral is really pushing things right off the bat. First there's the physical album itself. It's called The Power of Failing, goading the listener with its dubious grammatical correctness, and the title of the album is written in Comic Sans. Also, I should mention that there are definite religious undertones throughout this album, so I honestly don't know if its about romantic angst or religious piety, adding further stigma on top of the Comic Sans and the emo categorization (as much as I love emo, I always pretend I'm joking when I say that I listen to it because people always assume I listen to it ironically. Au contraire). Then we get right into "Five, Eight, and Ten," which starts with plenty of jangly emo goodness but goes and challenges us with the extremely sappy delivery of lines like "But I don't remember inviting them / to put me on this pedestal and make me feel so naked," almost asking us the question, "Are you sure this is what you're looking for?" But fear not, listener, for past lines like "And I want to know / the difference between / what sparkles and what is gold," intoned with an angst that is almost whiny in nature, we get into the meat of this album. "Five, Eight, and Ten" is definitely a rough gem, just like Mineral is in general, with a somewhat more lo-fi sound than on Sunny Day Real Estate's emo opus, Diary, but when they emerge at the end of this song, I'll be damned if I'm not pumped for more Mineral. You might say it "makes me want to try and start again," because good god, that line is delivered with some force - the same sort of force that I, completely unironically, I must shamefully admit (although, in fairness, I was pretty drunk), forced out of "Move Along" by All-American Rejects after the girl I had a crush on left a party I was at. Here, though, that desperation is right there for us to share, and it's that desperation that makes this a your-mileage-may-vary sort of album. If you want to jam out with something light and happy, Mineral's not the band for you, but if you want to hear someone sadder than you make angsty music, it's perfect. Mineral likes to live dangerously, but in this high risk-high reward game of hypersensitive emo, Mineral pulls through just at the end.
That spike at the end of "Five, Eight, and Ten" hardly lets up as we jump into the next song, probably Mineral's best known (if there is a best known Mineral song) and certainly their archetypal song - the anthemic "Gloria." The structure of this song is impeccable if predictable, and the delivery is perfect. It starts with a meek admission of failure (or failing, if you will) - "A gray morning. / Thoughts spread their wings and fly, / but I can still taste defeat on my lips" - setting the tone of this album of almost uninterrupted angst. Then everything is brought up a notch, with some frankly nonsensical lyrics delivered with just enough force to make us wonder what's next before everything bursts open with the line "I HAVE NOT YET ARRI-IVED." The rest of the lyrics in this song are so perfectly relatable, and express a welcome humility that can be hard to find in music at times. Lines like "How can I not admit? I need to know you" are just the beginning, as we get to the chorus of this song, the desperate and heartfelt line, "I just want to be something more than the mud in your eyes. / I want to be the clay in your hands." This song is like a terraced garden, building up to a brocaded peak, and what a peak it is! I sort of feel like one of the things that celebrates great emo from awful emo is the cleverness and/or sincerity of the lyrics, and with lines like "I NEED TO KNOW YOU" and that heart-breaking chorus, it doesn't get much more earnest than this. Once again, one gets the sense that Mineral really knows how to finish a song, as they pummel their way to the finish.
"Gloria" is a really powerful emotional moment, and I think following it with two somewhat more low-key songs in "Slower" and "Dolorosa" was just what this album needed. Not that these songs are necessarily low-key by objective standards - "Slower" emerges from a slower tempo into the a chorus with lines like "I spit into the wind and laugh as the words hit me in the face" - but the desperation is less overt here. I would say that these are more songs of acceptance and bargaining. "Slower" actually has quite a few compelling lines, including "people like you and me will never know the easy way" and "I swallow my pride and admit that it's not always best to understand the reasons why," and finishes with a ragged and forceful guitar solo before fading out again as we drift into the even less desperate "Dolorosa." "Dolorosa" doesn't beg for attention like the previous songs on this album. It more so glides with a sense of resignation onto the album, guitar riffs swelling and residing like the sea at high tide, always repeating the same verse before, like its predecessor, bursting into one of those urgent repeated verses that Mineral seems to be so good at. "Dolorosa" is also perhaps the most overtly religious song on the album, yet at the same time there's some sense of romantic discontent in it, which honestly makes it more relatable for me and probably for most other listeners as well. Warts and all, however, the sheer earnestness and honesty of this album pull it through. Even when they go wrong, they definitely mean well, which is good enough to keep us wanting more.
More is just what gets delivered with the nostalgia filled "80-37." I honestly have no idea what the title means, and I wish that I did. I guess 80-37=43? And Sunny Day Real Estate has songs called "47" and "48," so maybe emo bands are obsessed with numbers in the forties? I have no other ideas, but regardless this song is a bit schmaltzy but still packs enough of a punch to make it compelling. The sense of abandonment, and those lines at the end, "Things, they change, and people grow," followed by the conclusion, "They never really find the answers" is something we can all relate to on some level, and for me is the most compelling part of the song. Anecdotal imagery is similarly utilized to great effect on "If I Could," which is perhaps even more emotional than "80-37" was. The chiming guitar riff echos the imagery of that line, "I sat behind the wheel and watched the raindrops as they gathered on windshield / and raced down into the humming motor." For me, that line is so memorable, because it's something I've done whenever I'm bored during a car ride, but it's also a strangely potent metaphor for the random vicissitudes of fate.
Finally we get to perhaps the only happy song on this album, "July." Granted, it's not actually a happy song, but when compared to the rest of the songs on this album, the fact that it implies some sense of agency is quite refreshing. And hey, listen to that guitar intro! It's, like, kind of shimmery! I have no idea what the lyrics to this song mean, really, but the finale to this song is once again potent, the line "this is the last song that I should have been singing," unfortunately, sort of reminds us that this album is still the emo-est emo album that ever emo-ed, so don't get used to this mildly positive song. A shout out as well to the guitar solo at the end, which has a jolting speed to it, which goes well with the overall rawness of this album. "July" is followed by "Silver," perhaps the most forgettable song on this album, due to its somewhat slower pace. Despite the overall clichéd angst of the lyrics as well, the first line, "and happiness is just a dream, or so it seems," has a certain beauty to it. It almost sounds like something out of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Overall, this is sort of a standard track for Mineral, slowed down and drawn out a bit in order to relax us a bit after the pace of "July," so "Silver" is hardly an unwelcome presence on this album, although I'm not sure it fairs as well out of context as the rest of the songs on this album do. Next up is "Take the Picture Now," which starts with some nice, wistful imagery and some sort of twinkling guitars to start. As the energy palpably builds up before boiling over. Here I should add that I was wrong about "Dolorosa," because this song definitely has the most overt religious imagery, even using the word "redeemer" at one point. Nonetheless, it's a nice, heartfelt little song that sounds emo enough to ignore as a religious composition, and has a nice smoothness to it.
"Parking Lot" is destined to be the closer of this album, and it's honestly brilliant and every bit as good as "Gloria." First we have the most depressing lines of the album, with the juxtaposition of "I wouldn't mind if you took me in my sleep tonight" and "I know, I've got to live my life," but then we have some of the most compelling lyrics of The Power of Failing: "And realize on the way that I'm nothing more than a grain of salt in the salt of the earth," followed by that beautiful guitar swell. At the end, we get back to where we started, with that same image of nakedness and the same acute sense of failure (er... failing). A lot of more emotionally heavy albums try to be redemptive - Dog Man Star, Fantastic Planet, or This is Hardcore, for instance. The Power of Failing isn't one of those albums, but it is the perfect album for when you just want to wrap yourself in someone else's angst or scream your lungs out to some emo goodness. This is an album without the sharp wit of other emo albums like Do You Know Who You Are? or 24-hour Revenge Therapy, but it makes up for it with pure emotion and with a rawness that's missing from a lot of more recent emo music. In the end, The Power of Failing is honest and it's real, take it or leave it for what it is, but sometimes it's just what you need.
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Friday, August 14, 2015
Personal Canon Review: Sleep and Release by Aereogramme
So it's been awhile since I wrote anything on here, and I thought it might be fun to write some more reviews. One thing I noticed about some of the reviews that I wrote in the past is that reviewing something based on a week or two's worth of impressions isn't an especially good way to go about it. Sometimes it takes awhile for all of the strengths of an album to reveal themselves to you. As a result, you can end up, basically, being wrong, like I was about Suede's Dog Man Star, for instance, which I thought at first was just a less interesting successor to their debut. As a result, I'm going to review some albums that have had more of a chance to sink in, and in fact mean a lot to me on a personal level. For now I'm not going to rate these because I think that they're the sort of albums that, if you encounter them at the right time in your life, can be perfect tens, or may not appeal to you at all. Sometimes our tastes form at random depending on when we need a certain work of music - for me, albums like 100 Broken Windows, Dog Man Star, and Souvlaki are absolutely without question the best ever written, while the likes of OK Computer and The Suburbs don't especially appeal to me in the way they do to others. Anyway, I'm going to start with a bit of a challenge in Aereogramme's Sleep and Release. This is the band's second full album, after A Story in White, and while it abandons some elements that made A Story in White a great album, it also displays a true maturation in the band's craft.
Like their debut, Sleep and Release is an album built on shifts and contrasts. A Story in White found a lot of its impact in its juxtaposition of heavy, loud songs like "Zionist Timing" with hushed, sensitive songs like "Sunday 3:52" and "Motion." Sleep and Release follows this model to a certain extent, but in a much more ambitious that contrasts these disparate emotions within individuals songs, and with much more intense climaxes. Gone are the whispered intonations of old, as in "Sunday 3:52," where the repeated line "I demand your skin" expressed a vulnerability that was palpable to the listener. Herein continues to lie Aereogramme's greatest strength, however. The visceral qualities of their music continue to express raw emotion through sound just as much as through lyrics. This is nothing new - Aereogramme's more famous Scottish compatriots Mogwai have succeeded at this sort of thing for ages - yet Aereogramme's soundscapes impel shifts in emotion that are nearly unparalleled. This couples with lead singer Craig B's voice, at one moment a quivering falsetto, at others a rabid scream.
On Sleep and Release, the band seem to have honed the transitions between emotions, hopping from anguish to rage to confusion seamlessly and almost unnoticeably at times. This is an album that never sits still, and while this was the case with their debut - the first two minutes of "Zionist Timing" are so perfect that hearing them disappear without a trace is like heartbreak - this restlessness is perfected on their second album. "Indiscretion #243" cycles swiftly through four or five melodies before the song ends, transitioning from the compelling introductory line, "I'm listening like my father told me how to, I'm burning like my brother always knew I would," strangely echoing fellow angsty Scots The Twilight Sad's "Strong father figure with a heart of gold" and kids "on fire in the bedroom," into a hymnal chant that subsides just as swiftly. What comes next is the crushingly real "Black Path." Hardly ever has a song ever been so direct in its emotional impact, and while Aereogramme can be frustratingly grating at time, moments like these are what makes it possible to not only forgive them for these "indiscretions," but even hold them dear. I'm not sure what it is about this song that makes it cut so deep with me. Is it the melancholy, echoing bells that introduce the song? The imagery of mortality, "from green to red, black to gray"? The lyrics, all too real, that warn us about "when everyone becomes afraid of you" and to "see how pathless life can be," acknowledging just how random the events that shape our lives are, just how much it would do us good to allow ourselves to be vulnerable from time to time even if we feel compelled to put on our game-face day after day? This song hits it home in a way only Aereogramme can, somehow. I honestly don't think any music has ever been written with the emotional impact of "Black Path," "Sunday 3:52," and "Inkwell" (this last song from the band's album Seclusion). If any band could write music like this consistently, I'm not sure I could even debate about music anymore. That said, this is Aereogramme, so they move on, and so must we.
"A Simple Process of Elimination" brings one the core of the album, which is fraught with tension, confusion, and unease. Just as "Black Path" emerged from silence after the final riff of "Indiscretion #243," those sumptuous bells emerging from nothing, "A Simple Process of Elimination" is a stark diversion from its predecessor, its cold electronic clicks a shock after the decadent intimacy of "Black Path." This is a song that bring us slowly floating into the unrestrained anger of "Older," like the river in Heart of Darkness taking us ever so slowly to the horrors of the colonial Congo. The twinkling piano keys and floating plea to "erase us; erase this world" are followed by a desperate phone message, unambiguously taking a play from Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor's playbooks, and the still mysterious but slightly more active pulse of "Older," which swiftly crashes into blind, incoherent anger.
From this climax, which is basically the reason I don't offer Aereogramme as a recommendation to my friends, who would likely be a bit unnerved that I listen to music like that, "Older" fades into "No Really, Everything's Fine." This is an archetype for Aereogramme songs, a companion to the constantly shifting "Indiscretion #243" (which brings to mind the completely irrelevant Idlewild lyric "the sea's never calm. It always blows and knows it too"), with equally an equally compelling introduction to angst and a search for identity ("the reason we're all disfigured...") and a similar offer of religious imagery ("I say, 'Kingdom come'") transforming into a sorrowful admission of the hard to swallow truth: "We are all defenseless now / On your own your left somehow / With these broken bones." The musical swell as Craig B acknowledges his broken bones touches at the same nerve hit by "Black Path" before dissolving into a whirlwind of piano, guitar, and white noise before going back to the first line of the song. Ending abruptly, "No Really, Everything's Fine" is followed by "Wood," a song that shifts from a catchy introductory melody into a rage just as intense as in "Older."
This is followed, however, by the first transition into consistency of this album. Aereogramme offers us another morsel of delicious, heartfelt melody with "Yes," a beautiful, frank, and impassioned gem of a song with all of the beauty of "Black Path," but while "Black Path" feels like a delicate flower waiting to crumble, "Yes," clocking in at an unfortunately meager two minutes, because Aereogramme never lets any melody outstay its welcome, is an honest-to-god work of sensitive indie rock. Thematically, "Yes" ties this album together, lines like "shit, now you're only one hour away / Not that that matters when I couldn't stay" drawing the themes of helplessness from "Indiscretion #243," "Black Path," and "No Really, Everything's Fine," into a clarity that this album, with its foreboding instrumental interludes, has no had in any great helping up to this point. From "Yes" onward, this album shows a blunt honesty that almost borders on saccharinity compared to the riddles and metaphors that this album started with. You can almost sense this final shift in "In Gratitude" as Craig sings, "It is dangerous to put this into words, but I miss you." Yes, the raw emotion was already present in this album, but not the straightforward manner of speaking. "In Gratitude" doesn't have the punch of "Yes" - it replaces a gutsy guitar solo with a sweeping strings section and expressive imagery with straightforward statements - but it is otherwise a fine song, and by shifting one more notch toward tranquility, it brings us comfortably to "A Winter's Discord." This is perhaps the most subtle song by a band with loads of subtle songs ("Motion," "The Art of Belief," "Egypt," "Will You Still Find Me?"), and it's blink-and-you-miss-it chorus is something you need to be watching out for, but "A Winter's Discord" has plenty to offer as it lays us softly into the album's untitled closing track, a song that starts off slowly, but wakes us up again, leaving us with a violin melody that would seem at home in Game of Thrones. At the end of the day, we're left with the same sense of disorientation that we began with; fitting, as Sleep and Release lulls us once again into a false sense of security before reminding us that this album isn't easy, and isn't predictable. Indeed, Sleep and Release is a lot like life: hard at times, unbelievably rewarding at others. In the end, I suppose we must accept how "pathless life can be," as painful as the brevity of its melodies may be and as unnervingly as change may wrest us from times of comfort.
Like their debut, Sleep and Release is an album built on shifts and contrasts. A Story in White found a lot of its impact in its juxtaposition of heavy, loud songs like "Zionist Timing" with hushed, sensitive songs like "Sunday 3:52" and "Motion." Sleep and Release follows this model to a certain extent, but in a much more ambitious that contrasts these disparate emotions within individuals songs, and with much more intense climaxes. Gone are the whispered intonations of old, as in "Sunday 3:52," where the repeated line "I demand your skin" expressed a vulnerability that was palpable to the listener. Herein continues to lie Aereogramme's greatest strength, however. The visceral qualities of their music continue to express raw emotion through sound just as much as through lyrics. This is nothing new - Aereogramme's more famous Scottish compatriots Mogwai have succeeded at this sort of thing for ages - yet Aereogramme's soundscapes impel shifts in emotion that are nearly unparalleled. This couples with lead singer Craig B's voice, at one moment a quivering falsetto, at others a rabid scream.
On Sleep and Release, the band seem to have honed the transitions between emotions, hopping from anguish to rage to confusion seamlessly and almost unnoticeably at times. This is an album that never sits still, and while this was the case with their debut - the first two minutes of "Zionist Timing" are so perfect that hearing them disappear without a trace is like heartbreak - this restlessness is perfected on their second album. "Indiscretion #243" cycles swiftly through four or five melodies before the song ends, transitioning from the compelling introductory line, "I'm listening like my father told me how to, I'm burning like my brother always knew I would," strangely echoing fellow angsty Scots The Twilight Sad's "Strong father figure with a heart of gold" and kids "on fire in the bedroom," into a hymnal chant that subsides just as swiftly. What comes next is the crushingly real "Black Path." Hardly ever has a song ever been so direct in its emotional impact, and while Aereogramme can be frustratingly grating at time, moments like these are what makes it possible to not only forgive them for these "indiscretions," but even hold them dear. I'm not sure what it is about this song that makes it cut so deep with me. Is it the melancholy, echoing bells that introduce the song? The imagery of mortality, "from green to red, black to gray"? The lyrics, all too real, that warn us about "when everyone becomes afraid of you" and to "see how pathless life can be," acknowledging just how random the events that shape our lives are, just how much it would do us good to allow ourselves to be vulnerable from time to time even if we feel compelled to put on our game-face day after day? This song hits it home in a way only Aereogramme can, somehow. I honestly don't think any music has ever been written with the emotional impact of "Black Path," "Sunday 3:52," and "Inkwell" (this last song from the band's album Seclusion). If any band could write music like this consistently, I'm not sure I could even debate about music anymore. That said, this is Aereogramme, so they move on, and so must we.
"A Simple Process of Elimination" brings one the core of the album, which is fraught with tension, confusion, and unease. Just as "Black Path" emerged from silence after the final riff of "Indiscretion #243," those sumptuous bells emerging from nothing, "A Simple Process of Elimination" is a stark diversion from its predecessor, its cold electronic clicks a shock after the decadent intimacy of "Black Path." This is a song that bring us slowly floating into the unrestrained anger of "Older," like the river in Heart of Darkness taking us ever so slowly to the horrors of the colonial Congo. The twinkling piano keys and floating plea to "erase us; erase this world" are followed by a desperate phone message, unambiguously taking a play from Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor's playbooks, and the still mysterious but slightly more active pulse of "Older," which swiftly crashes into blind, incoherent anger.
From this climax, which is basically the reason I don't offer Aereogramme as a recommendation to my friends, who would likely be a bit unnerved that I listen to music like that, "Older" fades into "No Really, Everything's Fine." This is an archetype for Aereogramme songs, a companion to the constantly shifting "Indiscretion #243" (which brings to mind the completely irrelevant Idlewild lyric "the sea's never calm. It always blows and knows it too"), with equally an equally compelling introduction to angst and a search for identity ("the reason we're all disfigured...") and a similar offer of religious imagery ("I say, 'Kingdom come'") transforming into a sorrowful admission of the hard to swallow truth: "We are all defenseless now / On your own your left somehow / With these broken bones." The musical swell as Craig B acknowledges his broken bones touches at the same nerve hit by "Black Path" before dissolving into a whirlwind of piano, guitar, and white noise before going back to the first line of the song. Ending abruptly, "No Really, Everything's Fine" is followed by "Wood," a song that shifts from a catchy introductory melody into a rage just as intense as in "Older."
This is followed, however, by the first transition into consistency of this album. Aereogramme offers us another morsel of delicious, heartfelt melody with "Yes," a beautiful, frank, and impassioned gem of a song with all of the beauty of "Black Path," but while "Black Path" feels like a delicate flower waiting to crumble, "Yes," clocking in at an unfortunately meager two minutes, because Aereogramme never lets any melody outstay its welcome, is an honest-to-god work of sensitive indie rock. Thematically, "Yes" ties this album together, lines like "shit, now you're only one hour away / Not that that matters when I couldn't stay" drawing the themes of helplessness from "Indiscretion #243," "Black Path," and "No Really, Everything's Fine," into a clarity that this album, with its foreboding instrumental interludes, has no had in any great helping up to this point. From "Yes" onward, this album shows a blunt honesty that almost borders on saccharinity compared to the riddles and metaphors that this album started with. You can almost sense this final shift in "In Gratitude" as Craig sings, "It is dangerous to put this into words, but I miss you." Yes, the raw emotion was already present in this album, but not the straightforward manner of speaking. "In Gratitude" doesn't have the punch of "Yes" - it replaces a gutsy guitar solo with a sweeping strings section and expressive imagery with straightforward statements - but it is otherwise a fine song, and by shifting one more notch toward tranquility, it brings us comfortably to "A Winter's Discord." This is perhaps the most subtle song by a band with loads of subtle songs ("Motion," "The Art of Belief," "Egypt," "Will You Still Find Me?"), and it's blink-and-you-miss-it chorus is something you need to be watching out for, but "A Winter's Discord" has plenty to offer as it lays us softly into the album's untitled closing track, a song that starts off slowly, but wakes us up again, leaving us with a violin melody that would seem at home in Game of Thrones. At the end of the day, we're left with the same sense of disorientation that we began with; fitting, as Sleep and Release lulls us once again into a false sense of security before reminding us that this album isn't easy, and isn't predictable. Indeed, Sleep and Release is a lot like life: hard at times, unbelievably rewarding at others. In the end, I suppose we must accept how "pathless life can be," as painful as the brevity of its melodies may be and as unnervingly as change may wrest us from times of comfort.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)