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

i will say that i like this destroyer stuff more than any ariel pink i've heard. i've never heard any ariel pink that ever made me want to hear ariel pink again. some of it sounded really terrible to me. felt like the lex whenever he hears, uh, stuff the lex hates. the smiths or something.

oh god even i like destroyer more than ariel pink, at least it doesn't suffer from that "recorded in a drainpipe" thing

fucking wish i could shove ariel pink and his ilk inside a drainpipe

the smiths are even more repellent than all these people

dear god, i entirely missed that john maus interview/thread :/

ariel punkd

hey scott i know you didnt ask me but i like M83 less and less w/ every album but that said i still like them a lot!

I can't get past Gonzalez's voice.

oh i just wondered, tim. i don't really listen to M83 much. just on youtube. i think some of it is interesting. and i like some of the old/new blends that the guy gets. i think he's often successful at it. but, like i said earlier, i think the french are really good at the 80's.

That third album was very much "so much useless 80s ephemera" but in a very pure way that I thought I might grow to love if I put effort into it. I probably would have listened to it more but in honesty I find it hard to really devote myself to albums like that which I hear only after they're p4k-etc. feted, even if I like them; maybe it's some weird sense that these albums don't need my opinion </backdoor bragging>

I would like more stuff with that really gauzy atmosphere I suppose, like Bon Iver's "Beth/Rest" only not Bon Iver??? Also AMO1's "Freefall".

never really been able to get the hang of M-83. i liked a few songs off dead cities once upon a time, especially "run into flowers", but the album bored me, overall. subsequent flirtation with anthemic 80s pop left me cold, though the sounds were often beautiful.

not that anyone asked...

how can anyone not like 'kim and jessie'

its woozy small hours music, too much coke, walled into yourself. i want you to love me, you send me a coffin of roses. i guess avalon is a fair reference, but it misses something. its music influence by avalon in the same way that life sometimes feel like its being refracted through movies. it feels cinematic inasmuch as sometimes it feels like you get lost in being somebody else in the dark. bringing a cigarette to your lips, watching the smoke billow up through the lights in the club. this is it though, the glassy surfaces. everything is an image. how hard it is to feel things sometimes. its not empty though, its just half numb, playing itself playing at someone else.

i think this is a pretty strange album though. it doesn't help to just tell people that it sounds like steely dan, or late pet shop boys or al steward whatever. you think we're idiots? we've heard year of the cat. the album works differently, yeah its heavily influenced by those artists, but it seems really obvious that it wants to use them in a different way than to try and emulate them, or make an album in that tradition. there's a sense in which some music is "about" loving other music, or maybe not even loving other music but about the experience of other music. and so the way the appropriation of that language is functioning seems entirely different to how people want to characterise it here. that is, the comparative criticisms sort of miss the point entirely. yeah things are off, the guy has this wobbly croak of a voice, everything sounds glassily self contained, obsessively neat but weirdly off. a strange lens, the perspective doesn't work. something. but its not a failure at emulating Hats or Gaucho. it directly recalls those records, as records. as sound worlds that can be only re-accessed in this artificial way. a set of surfaces, images, movie scenes.

nabisco OTM

oops

wow plax! i am going to listen to this album now.

how can anyone not like 'kim and jessie'

Yeah, that passes Scott's quality material test.

then again, though that's a good deal of what kaputt is doing (reflecting the surfaces of ostensibly superficial things as means of addressing & communicating alienation), it's hard to square this reading with lyrical thrust of "suicide demo for kara walker".

re: judith

mr. editor, "the lyrical thrust", iyp.

suicide demo for kara walker is the result of a weird experiment w/ kara walker where she wrote the lyrics

its woozy small hours music, too much coke, walled into yourself. i want you to love me, you send me a coffin of roses. i guess avalon is a fair reference, but it misses something. its music influence by avalon in the same way that life sometimes feel like its being refracted through movies. it feels cinematic inasmuch as sometimes it feels like you get lost in being somebody else in the dark. bringing a cigarette to your lips, watching the smoke billow up through the lights in the club. this is it though, the glassy surfaces. everything is an image. how hard it is to feel things sometimes. its not empty though, its just half numb, playing itself playing at someone else.

This is really spot on.

It's not so much that Bejar could never write "More Than This", it's more that he could never write a song from the perspective of the singer of "More Than This", only from the perspective of someone sitting in the audience watching Ferry sing it and wishing for a moment that that could be him, and at the same time knowing it's an impossibility.

destroyer simply sounds magnificent, full stop. i could compare and argue all day long but i think i'll just chill with my eight month old and spin the 'kaputt' vinyl....just...one more time today.

just one more time.

or someone whose sensibility isn't very close to Ferry's but sympathizes with his yearning.

xpost

Yeah that's a really good way to put it.

looool omar

Bejar isn't interested in direct expression; his singing voice, by nature and design, isn't designed for it. Like a lot of songwriters he's stumbled into a host of deflectionary techniques.

Ferry's rather different. Even during high Roxy he always convinced me that he cared, which is a little different than convincing me that he wanted to care.

suicide demo for kara walker is the result of a weird experiment w/ kara walker where she wrote the lyrics

there you go then. w/e the source, though, those lyrics don't square with the overall themes you describe. placing it as the album's centerpiece and ending with two tracks that suggest a wrestling with america and history does give kaputt a strange spin overall. bejar invites attempts to read the whole as having concerns in common let england shake, but doesn't seem to deliver on that score. don't intend that as a slam.

Strange that Destroyer's cover of "Leave Me Alone" is a misfire -- the sentiment is so Bejar-esque but something about the straightforwardness of the lyric and chords unsettles him enough to produce a tentative performance.

the score bejar delivers on is smooth epic sounds to which i can vibe

"Smooth epic sounds to which I can vibe/Melody Maker, Smash Hits, all sounds like a dream to meeee..."

guys i'm listening to the new frankie rose and it kind of sounds like both of these albums put together

clear contender for ilm's 2012 album of the year

maybe the new order cover is bad because he could only reflect a good song through his prism of hesitant yearning and his wistful worship of more talented songwriters.

hahaha, just kidding.

and as much as i love new order - and boy did i ever love new order - i'm not gonna make a huge case for their rhyme schemes or vocal prowess.

what is is with 30+ ilxors and New Order

what is it with 30+ people and the printing press

well, you know, joy division/new order. i was a child of the 80's. they kept me going. JD probably still my 2nd fave band of all time.

and yr fave?

bananarama!

classic algerian goalkeeper

Bananarama recorded some fantastic singles!

i own 30 bananarama singles and lps on vinyl. at least. but no, first would be black sabbath. then joy division. then felt. then whatever.

what is it with 30+ people and the printing press

LOL

actually, FB3/Bananarama would be near the top for me too. bow wow wow as well. all top twenty in my book.

you even like S/A/W era Bananarama? That's when I went off them.

"I Heard a Rumour" is fantastic.

would like to say the things judith has said in this thread are super great

what abt wang chung

Re. Al Stewart + Neil Tennant equation, am listening to "On the Border" right now and wondering if Neil Tennant did not have a little Al Stewart in him anyway?

"wondering if Neil Tennant did not have a little Al Stewart in him anyway?"

those are just rumors.

Year of the Cat has Spanish guitar instead of saxophone.