so tell me, why is Kaputt better or worse than Let England Shake?

:D

Regardless of what you think of destroyer, equating "smooth and sexy" (which I'm sure lex you would say doesn't apply in any event) with a lack of ambition is wrongheaded IMO.

It's the kind of thing that gets written about Sade:

i can't say i don't understand the appeal of love deluxe. perhaps as a product of its relatively limited ambition, it provides a very consistent and comfortable listen. it's soothing, quietly sexy and nothing really juts out to wreck the flow. i could see it "working" quite well in a number of contexts.

FYI you are working with a really bad definition of "ambition" here.

― Tim F, Sunday, February 5, 2012 2:55 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh, thanks for the tip, tim. you wanna provide a better one? to my mind, kaputt is an album of "relatively limited" artistic ambition. it works within its chosen palette of sounds and what the artist already knows he does well. it does not challenge itself, its aesthetic or its listener to any remarkable degree. this is not a bad thing. to the extent that the album is successful on its own terms, i'd call it a virtue. hence the "consistent and comfortable listen".

OMG you did not compare sade to destroyer

The Spancer Krug? Wow...

tim i think one day you might actually kill me

i cannot breathe right now

Except it doesn't sound at all like any previous Destroyer albums

OMG you did not compare sade to destroyer

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend), maandag 6 februari 2012 0:26 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He, indeed, didn't.

Regardless of what you think of destroyer, equating "smooth and sexy" (which I'm sure lex you would say doesn't apply in any event) with a lack of ambition is wrongheaded IMO.

i didn't say that. i didn't directly equate the vibe of kaputt with a lack of ambition. i merely suggested that the former might be a product of the latter. crucial difference. fwiw, i'm equating ambition with artistic experimentation and rigor, self-challenge, and the willingness to push an aesthetic hard enough to see what happens at its outer reaches. but i'm not necessarily making a virtue of that sort of ambition, or a fault of its absence.

fwiw, i think that, in terms of the definition i'm using, the diamond life is a much more ambitious album than kaputt. its synthesis sounded instantaneously familiar, even nostalgic, in its moment, but it wasn't. sade created that sound out of whole cloth, and in terms of pop refinement, pushed the experiment a hell of a lot farther than destroyer. you know, imo...

if only dan bejar had the ambition of paris hilton

if you are releasing music, you have ambitions imo

fwiw, i'm equating ambition with artistic experimentation and rigor, self-challenge, and the willingness to push an aesthetic hard enough to see what happens at its outer reaches.

what would the "outer reaches" of this particular aesthetic look like to you?

yeah! well you've also got "suicide" as merely "stupid pride", a somewhat hardline xtian sentiment which that indeed daring pantheism x astrology "gods are crazy / stars are blind" double whammy immediately vexes. and then yr everyday manichaean "be the devil and angel too" chaser. paris milton more like.

― rtccc (mwah), Sunday, August 27, 2006 1:17 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

let me know when bejar comes up with anything a quarter of the worth of this

it's ambitious enough. certainly sounds better made than most indie crud. that's my high praise.

i mean it actually sounds like it took time to make. and there was thought involved. and craftsmanship and all that. i appreciate all that. but yeah the voice ends up distracting me cuz it just reminds me of 15 other voices. this isn't a problem for me when it comes to synthesizers. pj will always sound like pj to me. though people heard siouxsie on this album. i seem to recall that.

what would the "outer reaches" of this particular aesthetic look like to you?

impossible to say until someone gets there, right?

i can only say that, in my entirely subjective estimation, kaputt feels like the product of someone laying back in a comfortable, well-defined place and doing what feels right. let england shake, otoh, feels like the product of someone deliberately stepping out of their comfort zone and pushing through to make sense of unfamiliar territory. neither approach is necessarily any better or worse than the other, but like i said, i get more, personally, out of what PJH came up with in the process. and i'm inclined to describe it as more artistically "ambitious".

xp Yeah, one thing I don't get is where people calling it amateurish are coming from. Reacting more to Bejar's background than anything, I guess. If nothing else, Kaputt sounds really slick and professional to me.

it sounds great. on youtube no less!

i would still rather buy that Studio stuff though. they no longer exist, right? is there like a 2 cd thing i can buy? the complete Studio? now that stuff was ambitious.

that was like the last rilly good tip i got from ilm i think.

at least ldr is out there pushing her boundaries

scott just look for Yearbook 2

my problem with nu-80's type stuff is that i never stopped listening to actual 80's stuff? so there isn't actually a lot of nostalgia involved! does that make any sense at all? i've been listening to bananarama every year of my life since 1982 or whatever. they are still very much current to me. okay, maybe that makes no sense. those sounds are just a part of my life. completely. so in order for me to enjoy new stuff that sounds like old 80's synth/pop/newwave stuff the production OR the songs - and hopefully both - have to be REALLY high quality in order for me to enjoy them. like i said, dance people seem to do this the best. but dance people kinda exist to reference the past and make it new somehow. its like magic. non-dance music people usually aren't so swift. but this guy gets at something interesting. its not a total time-warp. which i appreciate. he's no blue nile, but who is?

yearbook 2, okay, i'll write that down. thanks.

my problem with nu 80s stuff is that ppl romanticizing the 80s are reliving the hideousness of boomers goin nuts about the sixties

like even though there was a lot of great shit that bears reinvestigating/closer readings, the perils of championing an era are so poisonous that it's better to just give all that shit a wide berth

so you think people should never any eras, or particularly the 80's?

should never champion*

I don't think this is 'championing an era'. it's playing w/ many of the sounds and themes of the era but that doesn't necessarily mean it's romanticizing them.

i get where you're coming from but i dunno i dont listen kaputt or west coast and go "oh cool 80's sounds here" i just hear awesome fresh music

ka*plop*

otm, I think the "80s sounds" of Destroyer are greatly exaggerated xp

I agree with iatee. Dealing with archetypes speaks to our history. It may well involve "romanticization," but not necessarily in a negative way.

I think to be on the safe side we should avoid the 2000s and 2010s cause they are possibly tainted with nostalgia for the 80s and its associated 60s nostalgia and oh shit people back then were probably nostalgic for the 40s. No place is safe.

Except the 90s.

so you think people should never any eras, or particularly the 80's?

kinda. idk it's like I'm particularly reactionary abt the 80s 'cause that's the era I was sort most plugged-into-the-zeitgeist in and I'm like NO IT WASN'T ACTUALLY AWESOME IT'S JUST THAT YOU WERE YOUNG & YOU MISS THAT, but at the same time, I do think there are things about any given era that are distinctive/worth talking about/defining. But yeah when people think one era is "better" I think they're morons tbph. Like I think metal right after Venom hits, that's a really interesting era to me, but narratives in which there's a peak/good part after which there are diminishing returns/etc seem like moronic self-serving youth-romanticizing tragedies

No '80s revival music strikes me as an assertion that the '80s were awesome.

tim you're kind of not exactly an impartial party on this q am I right

idk aero I think you are reading this as an 70/80s retro kick when really it's more like imagining a 70s/80s alternate universe

In what way?

Sometimes I think the world was supposed to end in the 80s and somehow someone forgot to throw the switch and we've ask just been droning on ever since...theres this old sci fi short story called ”twilight” that deals with something like that

xp @ iatee: well I think Bejar's particular deal is a sort of meta-investigating of the romanticization of the past, which has kind of always been his deal, but there's two things in play for me: what i think Bejar's doing, and how people respond to it. I'm considerably more reactionary about the latter, I dig what he does & we're pals besides though Kaputt hits all those 80s spots that I sort of would prefer to never hear again (as vs. a coworker of mine who thinks those sounds are the greatest things ever)

In what way?

don't you sort of adore the past unreservedly & champion much music from the 80s particularly?

Unreservedly? No. And partiality works both ways.

I don't think this is 'championing an era'. it's playing w/ many of the sounds and themes of the era but that doesn't necessarily mean it's romanticizing them.

romanticizing? yes, definitely.
championing? no.

I think the "80s sounds" of Destroyer are greatly exaggerated xp

??? it's hard to imagine a more explicit and direct musical evocation of a musical style & era, outside straight-up copycat/tribute shit.

imo kaputt sounds like "the Saturday Night Live Show Band"

there's a layer of irony that prevents this from romanticizing anything imo

I mean he's poking fun at 70s/80s signifiers while at the same time making remarkably pretty music w/ 70s/80s signifiers. the tension between those two things is what makes the album. imo.

But yeah when people think one era is "better" I think they're morons tbph. Like I think metal right after Venom hits, that's a really interesting era to me, but narratives in which there's a peak/good part after which there are diminishing returns/etc seem like moronic self-serving youth-romanticizing tragedies

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, February 5, 2012 7:22 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if I hadn't been around for both years, I'd probably pick '93. I was, though, and when I look at the '88 list, I get all BMW-driver-about-the-60s. It Takes Two came out in '88; as much I love a lotta '93 stuff (and as much as I think the strides made in '93 are kinda bigger toward broadening the genre, and therefore more "important"), hearing "It Takes Two" on KDAY was one of those "oh, shit, music is different after this for me" moments. You don't like it, so what, I don't care

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, January 8, 2012 3:20 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

mainstream rap just gravitated towards what seemed like cover versions. I enjoy a lot of those songs now and can hear all the production work & polish but at the time it seemed like a sad turn

...I loved The Chronic and Doggy Style (and Uncle Sam's Curse what year was that?) but the element of rap that was like mindblowing sheer sonics gave way to what were essentially rock records structurally - same rules as rock in terms of how you get to the vibe/effect. whereas that late 80s stuff was so Structures In Sound - but then again, Wu Tang is fully up on that when they come around, and they weren't "throwback" to me at that point, they were taking that vision to where it would have gone next if it had remained the dominant discourse, which it didn't.

not that all rap had been dense layers of Bomb Squad & not that there isn't plenty of trad song structure at play in Nation of Millions and shit but that's how I break it down to an extent, rap becoming more a new approach to songcraft than a new approach to sound.

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, January 8, 2012 10:18 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lots of/most people currently enjoying 80s sounds were too young to remember the 80s anyway. Or not even born. So it's not about romanticising some lost golden period of youth like it is with the boomers and the 60s

aerosmith on the money. dre ruined everything.